Quote from Similars: Aspect Sentiment Triplets Extraction with Hierarchical Inter-sentence Information Retrieval

Discovering possible candidate elements and capturing their connections to form the output triplets sit at the core challenge of Aspect Triplet Sentiment Extraction (ASTE). However, the information encapsulated by prevailing methods within a solitary sentence may often prove insufficient, particularly in complex scenarios characterized by uncommon aspect/opinion terms or intricate syntax patterns. To mitigate these limitations, we advocate incorporating inter-sentence information retrieval to enrich intra-sentence representations within ASTE. The existing study has proposed a method dubbed Retrieval-based Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction via Label Interpolation (RLI), which retrieves triplets from the corpus to augment the representations of a candidate aspect-opinion pair and further improve sentiment prediction. Nevertheless, obtaining data with standard triplets might be challenging in practice. Therefore, we propose an approach namely Multi-task ASTE with the Corpus-enhanced Graph (MACG) to conduct sentence-level retrieval and extract helpful information from unlabeled similar sentences. Specifically, we design a corpus-level enhanced graph to capture inter-sentence information, alongside a local graph preserving intra-sentence information. A graph neural network is subsequently employed to adaptively learn enhanced representations of the target sentence for ASTE. RLI and MACG collaboratively form a comprehensive methodological framework, which is effective in both scenarios with and without standard triplet labels. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and flexibility of retrieving inter-sentence information, which underscores their potential to advance the ASTE by leveraging neighboring information.