Retrieve-and-Edit Domain Adaptation for End2End Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis

End-to-end aspect based sentiment analysis (E2E-ABSA) aims to jointly extract aspect terms and predict aspect-level sentiment for opinion reviews. Though supervised methods show effectiveness for E2E-ABSA tasks, the annotation cost is extremely high due to the necessity of fine-grained labels. Recent attempts alleviate this problem using the domain adaptation technique to transfer the word-level common knowledge across domains. However, the biggest issue in domain adaptation, i.e., how to transfer the domain-specific words like pizza and delicious in the source “Restaurant” to the target “Laptop” domain, has not been resolved. In this paper, we propose a novel domain adaptation method to address this issue by enhancing the transferability of domain-specific source words in a retrieve-and-edit way. Specifically, for all source words, we first retrieve the transferable prototypes from unlabeled target data via their syntactic and semantic roles. We then edit the source words to enhance their transferability by absorbing the knowledge carried in prototypes. Finally, we design an end-to-end framework to jointly accomplish cross-domain aspect term extraction and aspect-level sentiment classification. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The results prove that, by introducing transferable prototypes, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving an absolute 3.95% F1 increase over the best baseline.