Zhibin Gou; Qingyan Guo; Yujiu Yang

Abstract

Generative methods greatly promote aspect-based sentiment analysis via generating a sequence of sentiment elements in a specified format. However, existing studies usually predict sentiment elements in a fixed order, which ignores the effect of the interdependence of the elements in a sentiment tuple and the diversity of language expression on the results. In this work, we propose Multi-view Prompting (MvP) that aggregates sentiment elements generated in different orders, leveraging the intuition of human-like problem-solving processes from different views. Specifically, MvP introduces element order prompts to guide the language model to generate multiple sentiment tuples, each with a different element order, and then selects the most reasonable tuples by voting. MvP can naturally model multi-view and multi-task as permutations and combinations of elements, respectively, outperforming previous task-specific designed methods on multiple ABSA tasks with a single model. Extensive experiments show that MvP significantly advances the state-of-the-art performance on 10 datasets of 4 benchmark tasks, and performs quite effectively in low-resource settings. Detailed evaluation verified the effectiveness, flexibility, and cross-task transferability of MvP.