Though great progress has been made in the Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis(ABSA) task through research, most of the previous work focuses on English-based ABSA problems, and there are few efforts on other languages mainly due to the lack of training data. In this paper, we propose an approach for performing a Cross-Lingual Aspect Sentiment Classification (CLASC) task which leverages the rich resources in one language (source language) for aspect sentiment classification in a under-resourced language (target language). Specifically, we first build a bilingual lexicon for domain-specific training data to translate the aspect category annotated in the source-language corpus and then translate sentences from the source language to the target language via Machine Translation (MT) tools. However, most MT systems are general-purpose, it non-avoidably introduces translation ambiguities which would degrade the performance of CLASC. In this context, we propose a novel approach called Reinforced Transformer with Cross-Lingual Distillation (RTCLD) combined with target-sensitive adversarial learning to minimize the undesirable effects of translation ambiguities in sentence translation. We conduct experiments on different language combinations, treating English as the source language and Chinese, Russian, and Spanish as target languages. The experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on different target languages.

Cluster computing technologies are rapidly advancing and user-generated online reviews are booming in the current Internet and e-commerce environment. The latest question–answering (Q&A)-style reviews are novel, abundant and easily digestible product reviews that also contain massive valuable information for customers. In this paper, we mine valuable aspect information of products contained in these reviews on GPU clusters. To achieve this goal, we utilize two subtasks of aspect-based sentiment analysis: aspect term extraction (ATE) and aspect category classification (ACC). Most previous works focused on only one task or solved these two tasks separately, even though they are highly interrelated, and they do not make full use of abundant training resources. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-task neural learning model to jointly handle these two tasks and explore the performance of our model on GPU clusters. We conducted extensive comparative experiments on an annotated corpus and found that our proposed model outperforms several baseline models in ATE and ACC tasks on GPU clusters, yielding significant strides in data mining for these types of reviews.

As an emerging research field, more and more researchers are turning their attention to multimodal entity linking (MEL). However, previous works always focus on obtaining joint representations of mentions and entities and then determining the relationship between mentions and entities by these representations. This means that their models are often very complex and will result in ignoring the relationship between different modal information from different corpus. To solve the above problems, we proposed a paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning for MEL. We designed three different categories of NSP tasks for pre-training, i.e., mixed-modal, text-only and multimodal and doubled the amount of data for pre-training by swapping the roles of sentences in NSP. Our experimental results show that our model outperforms other baseline models and our pre-training strategies all contribute to the improvement of the results. In addition, our pre-training gives the final model a strong generalization capability that performs well even on smaller amounts of data.

Online product reviews are exploring on e-commerce platforms, and mining aspect-level product information contained in those reviews has great economic benefit. The aspect category classification task is a basic task for aspect-level sentiment analysis which has become a hot research topic in the natural language processing (NLP) field during the last decades. In various e-commerce platforms, there emerge various user-generated question-answering (QA) reviews which generally contain much aspect-related information of products. Although some researchers have devoted their efforts on the aspect category classification for traditional product reviews, the existing deep learning-based approaches cannot be well applied to represent the QA-style reviews. Thus, we propose a 4-dimension (4D) textual representation model based on QA interaction-level and hyperinteraction-level by modeling with different levels of the text representation, i.e., word-level, sentence-level, QA interaction-level, and hyperinteraction-level. In our experiments, the empirical studies on datasets from three domains demonstrate that our proposals perform better than traditional sentence-level representation approaches, especially in the Digit domain.

Dong Zhang, Zheng Hu, Shoushan Li, Hanqian Wu, Qiaoming Zhu, Guodong Zhou. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers). 2021.