From Shortsighted to Bird View: Jointly Capturing All Aspects for Question-Answering Style Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to identify the opinion polarity towards a specific aspect. Traditional approaches formulate ABSA as a sentence classification task. However, it is observed that the single sentence classification paradigm cannot take full advantage of pre-trained language models. Previous work suggests it is better to cast ABSA as a question answering (QA) task for each aspect, which can be solved in the sentence-pair classification paradigm. Though QA-style ABSA achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, it naturally separates the prediction process of multiple aspects belonging to the same sentence. It thus is unable to take full advantage of the correlation between different aspects. In this paper, we propose to use the global-perspective (GP) question to replace the original question in QA-style ABSA, which explicitly tells the model the existence of other relevant aspects using additional instructions. In this way, the model can distinguish relevant phrases for each aspect better and utilize the underlying relationship between different aspects. The experimental results on three benchmark ABSA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.