Exploring ChatGPT-Based Augmentation Strategies for Contrastive Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) involves identifying sentiment toward specific aspect terms in a sentence and allows us to uncover people’s nuanced perspectives and attitudes on particular aspects of a product, service, or topic. However, the scarcity of labeled data poses a significant challenge to training high-quality models. To address this issue, we explore the potential of data augmentation using ChatGPT, a well-performing large language model, to enhance the sentiment classification performance toward aspect terms. Specifically, we explore three data augmentation strategies based on ChatGPT: context-focused, aspect-focused, and context–aspect data augmentation techniques. Context-focused data augmentation focuses on changing the word expression of context words in the sentence while keeping aspect terms unchanged. In contrast, aspect-focused data augmentation aims to change aspect terms but keep context words unchanged. Context–aspect data augmentation integrates these two data augmentations to generate augmented samples. Furthermore, we incorporate contrastive learning into the ABSA tasks to improve performance. Extensive experiments show that all three data augmentation techniques lead to performance improvements, with the context–aspect data augmentation strategy performing best and surpassing the performance of the baseline models.