Generative Models Enhanced by Sequence Labelling and Aspect-Code Switching Improve Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Abstract:Cross-lingual aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) transfers knowledge from a source language with annotated data to a target language, enabling fine-grained sentiment analysis without annotated target-language data. While monolingual ABSA has seen significant progress, cross-lingual ABSA remains underexplored, especially for complex tasks involving multiple sentiment elements like target-aspect-sentiment detection (TASD). In this paper, we propose a novel SeqLab framework that enhances cross-lingual ABSA using a sequence-to-sequence model with an auxiliary sequence-labelling task performed by the encoder, enhancing aspect term recognition and sentiment predictions. Additionally, we incorporate aspect-code switching (ACS), a translation-based technique that swaps aspect terms between source and translated sentences, generating additional training data to enhance the model's cross-lingual understanding. We evaluate our approach across eleven languages, three domains, and two backbone models, surpassing previous state-of-the-art results for the commonly studied E2E-ABSA task. Unlike most prior work that relies solely on English as the source language, we systematically assess different source-target language pairs and extend our evaluation to the more challenging, yet underexplored TASD task in cross-lingual settings. Finally, we provide a detailed error analysis highlighting key challenges and limitations.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.30425 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.30425v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.30425 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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