A Multi-Task Dual-Encoder Framework for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Abstract

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a complex and important task in aspect-based sentiment analysis task, which aims to extract aspect-sentiment-opinion triplets from review sentences, to acquire comprehensive information for sentiment analysis. Most of the existing methods use pipeline approaches or end-to-end sequence tagging approaches to solve the ASTE task. However, the pipeline approaches suffer from error accumulation in practical applications. The existing sequence tagging approaches ignore the feature information of the three elements themselves, and it is impossible to model and infer the three elements effectively by placing each word in the same position as importance. Based on this, a multitask dual-encoder framework is proposed. First, a dual-encoder is constructed to encode and fuse sentence information and semantic information, respectively. Then, the signs and constraints implied between word pairs are used to complete multi-task inference and triplet decoding. Meanwhile, we design two grid tagging methods and their corresponding inference strategies, respectively, for two tasks. The auxiliary task is used as a regularization of the main task, which improves the correct inference ability of the inference strategy for the main task and the robustness of the framework. Extensive testing on two benchmark datasets shows that the proposed framework is simple and effective, and significantly outperforms existing methods.INDEX TERMS Aspect based sentiment analysis, Aspect sentiment triplet extraction, Natural language processing.