Semantic-preserved Augmentation with Confidence-weighted Fine-tuning for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis

Large language model (LLM) is an effective approach to addressing data scarcity in low-resource scenarios. Recent existing research designs hand-crafted prompts to guide LLM for data augmentation. We introduce a data augmentation strategy for the aspect category sentiment analysis (ACSA) task that preserves the original sentence semantics and has linguistic diversity, specifically by providing a structured prompt template for an LLM to generate predefined content. In addition, we employ a post-processing technique to further ensure semantic consistency between the generated sentence and the original sentence. The augmented data increases the semantic coverage of the training distribution, enabling the model better to understand the relationship between aspect categories and sentiment polarities, enhancing its inference capabilities. Furthermore, we propose a confidence-weighted fine-tuning strategy to encourage the model to generate more confident and accurate sentiment polarity predictions. Compared with powerful and recent works, our method consistently achieves the best performance on four benchmark datasets over all baselines.