Cross-Domain Review Generation for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Supervised learning methods have proven to be effective for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). However, the lack of finegrained labeled data hinders their effectiveness in many domains. To address this issue, unsupervised domain adaptation methods are desired to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to any unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we propose a new domain adaptation paradigm called cross-domain review generation (CDRG), which aims to generate target-domain reviews with fine-grained annotation based on the source-domain labeled reviews. To achieve this goal, we propose a two-step approach as a concrete realization of CDRG. It first converts a sourcedomain review to a domain-independent review by masking its source-specific attributes, and then converts the domain-independent review to a target-domain review with a masked language model pre-trained in the target domain. We further propose two ways to leverage the generated target-domain reviews for two cross-domain ABSA tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our CDRG-based approaches over the state-of-theart domain adaptation methods.