Conditional Augmentation for Aspect Term Extraction via Masked Sequence-to-Sequence Generation

Kun Li, Chengbo Chen, Xiaojun Quan, Qing Ling, Yan Song


Abstract
Aspect term extraction aims to extract aspect terms from review texts as opinion targets for sentiment analysis. One of the big challenges with this task is the lack of sufficient annotated data. While data augmentation is potentially an effective technique to address the above issue, it is uncontrollable as it may change aspect words and aspect labels unexpectedly. In this paper, we formulate the data augmentation as a conditional generation task: generating a new sentence while preserving the original opinion targets and labels. We propose a masked sequence-to-sequence method for conditional augmentation of aspect term extraction. Unlike existing augmentation approaches, ours is controllable and allows to generate more diversified sentences. Experimental results confirm that our method alleviates the data scarcity problem significantly. It also effectively boosts the performances of several current models for aspect term extraction.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.631
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7056–7066
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.631
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.631
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kun Li, Chengbo Chen, Xiaojun Quan, Qing Ling, and Yan Song. 2020. Conditional Augmentation for Aspect Term Extraction via Masked Sequence-to-Sequence Generation. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 7056–7066, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conditional Augmentation for Aspect Term Extraction via Masked Sequence-to-Sequence Generation (Li et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.631.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928808
Data
SemEval-2014 Task-4