Modeling Adaptive Inter-Task Feature Interactions via Sentiment-Aware Contrastive Learning for Joint Aspect-Sentiment Prediction

Aspect prediction (AP) and sentiment prediction (SP) are representative applications in fine-grained sentiment anal- ysis. They can be considered as sequential tasks, where AP identifies mentioned aspects in a sentence, and SP infers fine-grained sentiments for these aspects. Recent models perform the aspect-sentiment prediction in a joint man-ner, but heavily rely on the feature interactions of aspect and sentiment. One drawback is that they ignore correlation strength varies between aspect features and sentiment fea- tures across different sentences, and employ a fixed feature interaction strategy may limit effective knowledge transfer across tasks. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose an Adaptive Inter-task Feature Interaction framework, AIFI, for joint aspect-sentiment prediction. Specifically, we introduce a novel contrast-based alignment method based on contrastive learning. Our approach considers the AP-specific and SP-specific representations of a given sentence as a positive pair, while representation of another random sentence serves as a negative example. Moreover, we propose an inter-task feature correlation network to predict the contrast strength, which is determined by the temperature coefficient in the InfoNCE loss. This dynamic correlation adjustment enhances model’s ability to capture proper feature interactions more efficiently. Experimental results on three datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.