Semantic-preserved Augmentation with Confidence-weighted Fine-tuning for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel data augmentation and fine-tuning approach for aspect category sentiment analysis using large language models, improving semantic consistency and prediction confidence to achieve state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

It introduces a structured prompt-based augmentation method with semantic preservation and a confidence-weighted fine-tuning strategy for improved sentiment analysis.

Findings

Achieves superior performance on four benchmark datasets.

Enhances semantic coverage and consistency in augmented data.

Improves model confidence and accuracy in sentiment predictions.

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) is an effective approach to addressing data scarcity in low-resource scenarios. Recent existing research designs hand-crafted prompts to guide LLM for data augmentation. We introduce a data augmentation strategy for the aspect category sentiment analysis (ACSA) task that preserves the original sentence semantics and has linguistic diversity, specifically by providing a structured prompt template for an LLM to generate predefined content. In addition, we employ a post-processing technique to further ensure semantic consistency between the generated sentence and the original sentence. The augmented data increases the semantic coverage of the training distribution, enabling the model better to understand the relationship between aspect categories and sentiment polarities, enhancing its inference capabilities. Furthermore, we propose a confidence-weighted fine-tuning strategy to encourage the model to generate more confident and accurate sentiment polarity predictions. Compared with powerful and recent works, our method consistently achieves the best performance on four benchmark datasets over all baselines.