Meta-based self-training and re-weighting for aspect-based sentiment analysis

Abstract

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) means to identify fine-grained aspects, opinions, and sentiment polarities. Recent ABSA research focuses on utilizing multi-task learning (MTL) to achieve less computational costs and better performance. However, there are certain limits in MTL-based ABSA. For example, unbalanced labels and sub-task learning difficulties may result in the biases that some labels and sub-tasks are overfitting, while the others are underfitting. To address these issues, inspired by neuro-symbolic learning systems, we propose a meta-based self-training method with a meta-weighter (MSM). We believe that a generalizable model can be achieved by appropriate symbolic representation selection (in-domain knowledge) and effective learning control (regulation) in a neural system. Thus, MSM trains a teacher model to generate in-domain knowledge (e.g., unlabeled data selection and pseudo-label generation), where the generated pseudo-labels are used by a student model for supervised learning. Then, the meta-weighter of MSM is jointly trained with the student model to provide each instance with sub-task-specific weights to coordinate their convergence rates, balancing class labels, and alleviating noise impacts introduced from self-training. The following experiments indicate that MSM can utilize 50% labeled data to achieve comparable results to state-of-arts models in ABSA and outperform them with all labeled data.