Leveraging Only the Category Name for Aspect Detection through Prompt-based Constrained Clustering

Abstract

Aspect category detection (ACD) aims to automatically identify user-concerned aspects from online reviews, which is of great value for evaluating the fine-grained performance of a product. The most recent solutions tackle this problem via weakly supervised methods, achieving remarkable improvement over unsupervised methods. However, a closer look at these methods reveals that the required human efforts are nontrivial and can sometimes be hard to obtain. In this study, we explore the possibility of minimizing human guidance while improving detection performance, with a deep clustering method that relies merely on the category name of each aspect and a pretrained language model (LM). The LM, combined with prompt techniques, is employed as a knowledge base to automatically generate constraints for clustering, as well as to provide a representation space to perform the clustering. Our method (1) extracts extensive keywords to expand our understanding of each aspect, (2) automatically generates instance-level and concept-level constraints for clustering, and (3) trains the clustering model with the above constraints. We demonstrate the capability of the proposed framework through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets across nine domains. Our model not only performs noticeably better than existing unsupervised approaches but also considerably surpasses weakly supervised methods that require more human efforts. Our code is available at: https://github.com/liyazheng/PCCT.