An Adaptive Hybrid Framework for Cross-domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to utilize the useful knowledge in a source domain to extract aspect terms and predict their sentiment polarities in a target domain. Recently, methods based on adversarial training have been applied to this task and achieved promising results. In such methods, both the source and target data are utilized to learn domain-invariant features through deceiving a domain discriminator. However, the task classifier is only trained on the source data, which causes the aspect and sentiment information lying in the target data can not be exploited by the task classifier. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Hybrid Framework (AHF) for cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis. We integrate pseudo-label based semi-supervised learning and adversarial training in a unified network. Thus the target data can be used not only to align the features via the training of domain discriminator, but also to refine the task classifier. Furthermore, we design an adaptive mean teacher as the semi-supervised part of our network, which can mitigate the effects of noisy pseudo labels generated on the target data. We conduct experiments on four public datasets and the experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.