Multi-Domain Aspect Extraction Using Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformers

Deep learning and neural language models have obtained state-of-the-art results in aspects extraction tasks, in which the objective is to automatically extract characteristics of products and services that are the target of consumer opinion. However, these methods require a large amount of labeled data to achieve such results. Since data labeling is a costly task, there are no labeled data available for all domains. In this paper, we propose an approach for aspect extraction in a multi-domain transfer learning scenario, thereby leveraging labeled data from different source domains to extract aspects of a new unlabeled target domain. Our approach, called MDAE-BERT (Multi-Domain Aspect Extraction using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), explores neural language models to deal with two major challenges in multi-domain learning: (1) inconsistency of aspects from target and source domains and (2) context-based semantic distance between ambiguous aspects. We evaluated our MDAE-BERT considering two perspectives (1) the aspect extraction performance using F1-Macro and Accuracy measures; and (2) by comparing the multi-domain aspect extraction models and single-domain models for aspect extraction. In the first perspective, our method outperforms the LSTM-based approach. In the second perspective, our approach proved to be a competitive alternative compared to the single-domain model trained in a specific domain, even in the absence of labeled data from the target domain.