Transferable interactive memory network for domain adaptation in fine-grained opinion extraction

Abstract

In fine-grained opinion mining, aspect and opinion terms extraction has become a fundamental task that provides key information for user-generated texts. Despite its importance, a lack of annotated resources in many domains impede the ability to train a precise model. Very few attempts have applied unsupervised domain adaptation methods to transfer fine-grained knowledge (in the word level) from some labeled source domain(s) to any unlabeled target domain. Existing methods depend on the construction of “pivot” knowledge, e.g., common opinion terms or syntactic relations between aspect and opinion words. In this work, we propose an interactive memory network that consists of local and global memory units. The model could exploit both local and global memory interactions to capture intra-correlations among aspect words or opinion words themselves, as well as the interconnections between aspect and opinion words. The source space and the target space are aligned through these domain-invariant interactions by incorporating an auxiliary task and domain adversarial networks. The proposed model does not require any external resources and demonstrates promising results on 3 benchmark datasets.