{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-generative-language-model-for-few-shot-1","title":"A Generative Language Model for Few-shot Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis","arxiv_id":"2204.05356","date":"2022-04-11","proceeding":"Findings (NAACL) 2022 7","authors":["Ehsan Hosseini-Asl","Wenhao Liu","Caiming Xiong"],"abstract":"Sentiment analysis is an important task in natural language processing. In recent works, pre-trained language models are often used to achieve state-of-the-art results, especially when training data is scarce. It is common to fine-tune on the downstream task, usually by adding task-specific layers on top of the model. In this paper, we focus on aspect-based sentiment analysis, which involves extracting aspect term, category, and predicting their corresponding polarities. In particular, we are interested in few-shot settings. We propose to reformulate the extraction and prediction tasks into the sequence generation task, using a generative language model with unidirectional attention (GPT2 is used unless stated otherwise). This way, the model learns to accomplish the tasks via language generation without the need of training task-specific layers. Our evaluation results on the single-task polarity prediction show that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (based on BERT) on average performance by a large margins in few-shot and full-shot settings. More importantly, our generative approach significantly reduces the model variance caused by low-resource data. We further demonstrate that the proposed generative language model can handle joint and multi-task settings, unlike previous work. We observe that the proposed sequence generation method achieves further improved performances on polarity prediction when the model is trained via joint and multi-task settings. Further evaluation on similar sentiment analysis datasets, SST-2, SST- and OOS intent detection validates the superiority and noise robustness of generative language model in few-shot settings.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.05356v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.05356v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-generative-language-model-for-few-shot-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/salesforce/fewshot_absa","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"aspect-based-sentiment-analysis-1","task_name":"Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis"},{"task_slug":"aspect-based-sentiment-analysis","task_name":"Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA)"},{"task_slug":"intent-detection","task_name":"Intent Detection"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"SST-2"},{"task_slug":"sentiment-analysis","task_name":"Sentiment Analysis"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}