SoftMCL: Soft Momentum Contrastive Learning for Fine-grained Sentiment-aware Pre-training

Jin Wang, Liang-Chih Yu, Xuejie Zhang


Abstract
The pre-training for language models captures general language understanding but fails to distinguish the affective impact of a particular context to a specific word. Recent works have sought to introduce contrastive learning (CL) for sentiment-aware pre-training in acquiring affective information. Nevertheless, these methods present two significant limitations. First, the compatibility of the GPU memory often limits the number of negative samples, hindering the opportunities to learn good representations. In addition, using only a few sentiment polarities as hard labels, e.g., positive, neutral, and negative, to supervise CL will force all representations to converge to a few points, leading to the issue of latent space collapse. This study proposes a soft momentum contrastive learning (SoftMCL) for fine-grained sentiment-aware pre-training. Instead of hard labels, we introduce valence ratings as soft-label supervision for CL to fine-grained measure the sentiment similarities between samples. The proposed SoftMCL conducts CL on both the word- and sentence-level to enhance the model’s ability to learn affective information. A momentum queue was introduced to expand the contrastive samples, allowing storing and involving more negatives to overcome the limitations of hardware platforms. Extensive experiments were conducted on four different sentiment-related tasks, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed SoftMCL method. The code and data of the proposed SoftMCL is available at: https://www.github.com/wangjin0818/SoftMCL/.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1305
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:
15012–15023
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1305
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jin Wang, Liang-Chih Yu, and Xuejie Zhang. 2024. SoftMCL: Soft Momentum Contrastive Learning for Fine-grained Sentiment-aware Pre-training. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 15012–15023, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
SoftMCL: Soft Momentum Contrastive Learning for Fine-grained Sentiment-aware Pre-training (Wang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1305.pdf