Aspect-Category based Sentiment Analysis with Unified Sequence-To-Sequence Transfer Transformers

Abstract

In recent years, Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received increasing attention from the scientific community for Vietnamese language. However, most previous studies solved various subtasks in ABSA based on machine learning, deep learning and transformer-based architectures in a classification way. Recently, the release of pre-trained sequence-to-sequence brings a new approach to address the ABSA as a text generation problem for Vietnamese ABSA tasks. In this paper, we formulate the Aspect-category based sentiment analysis task as the conditional text generation task and investigate different unified generative transformer-based models. To represent the labels in a natural sentence, we apply a simple statistical method and observation of the commenting style. We conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets. As a result, our model achieved new state-of-the-art results with the micro F1-score of 75.53% and 86.60% for the two datasets with different levels for the restaurant domain. In addition, our experimental results achieved the best score for the smartphone domain with the macro F1-score of 81.10%.

Keywords: Aspect-based sentiment analysis, unified model, Vietnamese language, pre-trained language models.