# Bidirectional Machine Reading Comprehension for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07665/

## Key facts

- Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04115/) (2017)
- [Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01603/) (2016)
- [The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08730/) (2018)
- [A Unified MRC Framework for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11476/) (2019)
- [QANet: Combining Local Convolution with Global Self-Attention for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09541/) (2018)
- [Knowing What, How and Why: A Near Complete Solution for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01616/) (2019)
- [Entity-Relation Extraction as Multi-Turn Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05529/) (2019)
- [Interactive Attention Networks for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00893/) (2017)
- [Aspect Level Sentiment Classification with Deep Memory Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08900/) (2016)
- [A Unified Model for Opinion Target Extraction and Target Sentiment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05082/) (2018)
- [An Interactive Multi-Task Learning Network for End-to-End Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06906/) (2019)
- [Double Embeddings and CNN-based Sequence Labeling for Aspect Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04601/) (2018)
- [Aspect Term Extraction with History Attention and Selective Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00760/) (2018)
- [Recursive Neural Conditional Random Fields for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06679/) (2016)
- [Neural Aspect and Opinion Term Extraction with Mined Rules as Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03750/) (2019)
- [CAN: Constrained Attention Networks for Multi-Aspect Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10735/) (2018)
- [Exploiting Document Knowledge for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04346/) (2018)
- [Exploiting Coarse-to-Fine Task Transfer for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10999/) (2018)
- [Latent Opinions Transfer Network for Target-Oriented Opinion Words Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01989/) (2020)
- [DOER: Dual Cross-Shared RNN for Aspect Term-Polarity Co-Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01794/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00796/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: Tasks, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01054/) (2022)
- [InstructABSA: Instruction Learning for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08624/) (2023)
- [MNER-QG: An End-to-End MRC framework for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Query Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14739/) (2022)
- [Seeking Common but Distinguishing Difference, A Joint Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09634/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Event Extraction: Approaches and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02126/) (2021)
- [Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction Using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06107/) (2021)
- [A Span-level Bidirectional Network for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12674/) (2022)
- [STAGE: Span Tagging and Greedy Inference Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15003/) (2022)
- [A More Fine-Grained Aspect-Sentiment-Opinion Triplet Extraction Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15255/) (2021)
- [A Unified One-Step Solution for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04152/) (2023)
- [MiniConGTS: A Near Ultimate Minimalist Contrastive Grid Tagging Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11234/) (2024)
- [MEMD-ABSA: A Multi-Element Multi-Domain Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16956/) (2023)
- [Self-Training with Pseudo-Label Scorer for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18078/) (2024)
- [A Pairing Enhancement Approach for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10042/) (2023)
- [CONTRASTE: Supervised Contrastive Pre-training With Aspect-based Prompts For Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15577/) (2023)
- [Structural Bias for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00820/) (2022)
- [Adaptive loose optimization for robust question answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03971/) (2023)
- [Measuring Your ASTE Models in The Wild: A Diversified Multi-domain Dataset For Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17448/) (2023)
- [A semantically enhanced dual encoder for aspect sentiment triplet extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08373/) (2023)
- [Dual Encoder: Exploiting the Potential of Syntactic and Semantic for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15370/) (2024)
- [ZZU-NLP at SIGHAN-2024 dimABSA Task: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Coarse-to-Fine In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15341/) (2024)
- [PGSO: Prompt-based Generative Sequence Optimization Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00763/) (2024)
- [A Better Choice: Entire-space Datasets for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09052/) (2022)
- [A Weak Supervision Approach for Few-Shot Aspect Based Sentiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11979/) (2023)
- [Rethinking ASTE: A Minimalist Tagging Scheme Alongside Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07342/) (2024)
- [E2TP: Element to Tuple Prompting Improves Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06454/) (2024)
- [EmoGRACE: Aspect-based emotion analysis for social media data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15133/) (2025)
- [Explicit Interaction Network for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11148/) (2021)
- [Pretrained Language Encoders are Natural Tagging Frameworks for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09617/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE), which aims to identify aspects from review sentences along with their corresponding opinion expressions and sentiments, is an emerging task in fine-grained opinion mining. Since ASTE consists of multiple subtasks, including opinion entity extraction, relation detection, and sentiment classification, it is critical and challenging to appropriately capture and utilize the associations among them. In this paper, we transform ASTE task into a multi-turn machine reading comprehension (MTMRC) task and propose a bidirectional MRC (BMRC) framework to address this challenge. Specifically, we devise three types of queries, including non-restrictive extraction queries, restrictive extraction queries and sentiment classification queries, to build the associations among different subtasks. Furthermore, considering that an aspect sentiment triplet can derive from either an aspect or an opinion expression, we design a bidirectional MRC structure. One direction sequentially recognizes aspects, opinion expressions, and sentiments to obtain triplets, while the other direction identifies opinion expressions first, then aspects, and at last sentiments. By making the two directions complement each other, our framework can identify triplets more comprehensively. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that BMRC achieves state-of-the-art performances.