CLAOCS-TX: Cross-Lingual Triplet Extraction with Aspect-Opinion-Aware Code-Switched Prompting and LLM-Guided Contrastive Distillation

Cross-lingual learning enables the transfer of structured sentiment knowledge from high-resource languages to unlabeled or low-resource languages, but prior work has largely focused on coarse-grained sentiment classification or aspect extraction. In contrast, zero-shot cross-lingual aspectopinion-sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE), which extracts sentiment triplets of the form (aspect term, opinion term, sentiment polarity), remains underexplored. We propose a unified framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) as both structured pseudo-label generators and semantic teachers for ASTE. Our approach employs stepwise structured prompting over aspect-and opinion-aware code-switched variants to generate reliable pseudo triplets, followed by a multi-variant consistency filter to retain high-confidence supervision. We further introduce a triplet-aware contrastive distillation objective that aligns student triplet representations with LLM-encoded semantic embeddings. During inference, only the student ASTE model is used, without requiring LLM access. Experiments on four non-Indic and four low-resource Indic target languages show consistent improvements over strong cross-lingual and LLM-based baselines. The proposed method yields an absolute micro-F1 improvement of 5.3 points on non-Indic languages and 3.8 points on low-resource Indic languages compared to the best competing approach. Ablation results further validate the complementary roles of aspect-and opinion-aware code-switched prompting and triplet-aware contrastive distillation, with larger relative gains observed in low-resource Indic settings.