# UnifiedABSA: A Unified ABSA Framework Based on Multi-task Instruction Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10986 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10986/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00700/) (2020)
- [True Few-Shot Learning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11447/) (2021)
- [Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05019/) (2019)
- [The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08730/) (2018)
- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05966/) (2022)
- [Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12277/) (2022)
- [Structured Prediction as Translation between Augmented Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05779/) (2021)
- [Knowing What, How and Why: A Near Complete Solution for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01616/) (2019)
- [Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00796/) (2021)
- [A Unified Generative Framework for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04300/) (2021)
- [Position-Aware Tagging for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02609/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Text Generation with Pattern-Exploiting Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11926/) (2020)
- [Effective LSTMs for Target-Dependent Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.01100/) (2015)
- [The Turking Test: Can Language Models Understand Instructions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11982/) (2020)
- [Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis with Gated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07043/) (2018)
- [A Joint Training Dual-MRC Framework for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00816/) (2021)
- [Learning Span-Level Interactions for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12214/) (2021)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Large Language Models Meet NLP: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12819/) (2024)
- [MvP: Multi-view Prompting Improves Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12627/) (2023)
- [RVISA: Reasoning and Verification for Implicit Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02340/) (2024)
- [EFSA: Towards Event-Level Financial Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08681/) (2024)
- [The Limits of ChatGPT in Extracting Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment Quadruples: A Comparative Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06502/) (2023)
- [iACOS: Advancing Implicit Sentiment Extraction with Informative and Adaptive Negative Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03896/) (2023)
- [When LLMs Team Up: The Emergence of Collaborative Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01698/) (2025)
- [A Weak Supervision Approach for Few-Shot Aspect Based Sentiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11979/) (2023)
- [Embarrassingly Simple Unsupervised Aspect Based Sentiment Tuple Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13751/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to provide fine-grained aspect-level sentiment information. There are many ABSA tasks, and the current dominant paradigm is to train task-specific models for each task. However, application scenarios of ABSA tasks are often diverse. This solution usually requires a large amount of labeled data from each task to perform excellently. These dedicated models are separately trained and separately predicted, ignoring the relationship between tasks. To tackle these issues, we present UnifiedABSA, a general-purpose ABSA framework based on multi-task instruction tuning, which can uniformly model various tasks and capture the inter-task dependency with multi-task learning. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that UnifiedABSA can significantly outperform dedicated models on 11 ABSA tasks and show its superiority in terms of data efficiency.