
Instruction Tuning for Few-Shot Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
Siddharth Varia1∗Shuai Wang1∗Kishaloy Halder1∗Robert Vacareanu2†∗
Miguel Ballesteros1Yassine Benajiba1Neha Anna John1
Rishita Anubhai1Smaranda Muresan1Dan Roth1
1AWS AI Labs
2University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
{siddhvar, wshui, kishaloh, ballemig, benajiy, ranubhai, smaranm, drot}@amazon.com
rvacareanu@arizona.edu
Abstract
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a
fine-grained sentiment analysis task which in-
volves four elements from user-generated texts:
aspect term, aspect category, opinion term, and
sentiment polarity. Most computational ap-
proaches focus on some of the ABSA sub-tasks
such as tuple (aspect term, sentiment polar-
ity) or triplet (aspect term, opinion term, senti-
ment polarity) extraction using either pipeline
or joint modeling approaches. Recently, gener-
ative approaches have been proposed to extract
all four elements as (one or more) quadruplets
from text as a single task. In this work, we take
a step further and propose a unified framework
for solving ABSA, and the associated sub-tasks
to improve the performance in few-shot scenar-
ios. To this end, we fine-tune a
T5
model with
instructional prompts in a multi-task learning
fashion covering all the sub-tasks, as well as
the entire quadruple prediction task. In experi-
ments with multiple benchmark datasets, we
show that the proposed multi-task prompting
approach brings performance boost (by abso-
lute
8.29
F1) in the few-shot learning setting.
1 Introduction
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a
fine-grained sentiment analysis task where the goal
is to extract the sentiment associated with an entity
and all its aspects (Liu,2012;Pontiki et al.,2014,
2015,2016;Schouten and Frasincar,2015;Zhang
et al.,2018;Nazir et al.,2020;Zhang et al.,2022).
For example, in the context of Restaurant reviews
the relevant aspects could be food, ambience, lo-
cation, service with general used to represent the
subject itself (i.e., restaurant). ABSA can provide
valuable fine-grained information for businesses
to analyze the aspects they care about. Annotated
∗Indicates equal contribution.
†Work done during internship at AWS.
Figure 1: Illustrative orientation of four ABSA elements
i.e., Aspect Term, Aspect Category, Opinion Term, and
Sentiment. The related tasks often involve predicting
either everything together or a subset of them.
datasets have been released to foster research in
this area (Pontiki et al.,2014,2015,2016).
A full ABSA task aims to extract four elements
from a user-generated text: aspect term, aspect
category, opinion term and the sentiment polar-
ity (see Figure 1for an example). Most existing
approaches have the focus on extracting some of
these elements such as a single element (e.g., as-
pect term), tuple (e.g., aspect term, sentiment po-
larity), or triplet (e.g., aspect term, aspect cate-
gory, sentiment polarity) (Li et al.,2020;Hu et al.,
2019;Xu et al.,2020a). Recently, Zhang et al.
(2021a) tackled the full ABSA task, under the
name of Aspect Sentiment Quadruple Prediction
(ASQP). Technically, most existing computational
approaches have used extractive and discrimina-
tive models either in a pipeline or in an end-to-end
framework (Wang et al.,2016;Yu et al.,2019;
Cai et al.,2021) to address ABSA. Generative ap-
proaches have been recently shown to be effective
for the full ABSA task and its sub-tasks (Zhang
et al.,2021a,b;Yan et al.,2021). Most notably,
Zhang et al. (2021a) used a sequence-to-sequence
(seq-to-seq) model to address ASQP as a para-
phrase generation problem. One important con-
sideration is that modeling ABSA in a generative
fashion allows for cross-task knowledge transfer.
We go a step further and propose a unified model
arXiv:2210.06629v2 [cs.CL] 11 Jun 2023