Cross-Domain Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification by Exploiting Domain- Invariant Semantic-Primary Feature

Abstract

Aspect-based sentiment analysis is an important task in fine-grained sentiment analysis, which aims to infer the sentiment towards a given aspect. Previous studies have shown notable success when sufficient labeled training data is available. However, annotating adequate data is labor-intensive, which sets substantial barriers for generalizing the sentiment predictor to the new domain. Two main challenges exist in cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis. One challenge is acquiring the domain-invariant knowledge; the other challenge is mining the syntactic-related words towards the aspect-term. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based semantic-primary knowledge transferring network (TSPKT) for cross-domain aspect-term sentiment analysis, which utilizes semantic-primary knowledge as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer across domains. Specifically, we first build an S-Graph from external semantic lexicons, and extract the semantic-primary knowledge from the S-Graph. Second, AoaGraphormer is proposed to learn the syntactically relevant words towards the aspect-term. Third, we extend the standard biLSTM classifier to fully integrate the semantic-primary knowledge by adding a novel knowledge-aware memory unit (KAMU) to the biLSTM cell. Extensive experiments on six cross-domain setups demonstrate the superiority of TSPKT against the state-of-the-art baseline methods.