Let’s Rectify Step by Step: Improving Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Diffusion Models

Shunyu Liu, Jie Zhou, Qunxi Zhu, Qin Chen, Qingchun Bai, Jun Xiao, Liang He


Abstract
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) stands as a crucial task in predicting the sentiment polarity associated with identified aspects within text. However, a notable challenge in ABSA lies in precisely determining the aspects’ boundaries (start and end indices), especially for long ones, due to users’ colloquial expressions. We propose DiffusionABSA, a novel diffusion model tailored for ABSA, which extracts the aspects progressively step by step. Particularly, DiffusionABSA gradually adds noise to the aspect terms in the training process, subsequently learning a denoising process that progressively restores these terms in a reverse manner. To estimate the boundaries, we design a denoising neural network enhanced by a syntax-aware temporal attention mechanism to chronologically capture the interplay between aspects and surrounding text. Empirical evaluations conducted on eight benchmark datasets underscore the compelling advantages offered by DiffusionABSA when compared against robust baseline models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Qlb6x/DiffusionABSA.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.902
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
10324–10335
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.902
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shunyu Liu, Jie Zhou, Qunxi Zhu, Qin Chen, Qingchun Bai, Jun Xiao, and Liang He. 2024. Let’s Rectify Step by Step: Improving Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Diffusion Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 10324–10335, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Let’s Rectify Step by Step: Improving Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Diffusion Models (Liu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.902.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.902.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip