# Improving Generative Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Constrained Decoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10369 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10369/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Entity Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00904/) (2020)
- [Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15005/) (2023)
- [Orca 2: Teaching Small Language Models How to Reason](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11045/) (2023)
- [Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00796/) (2021)
- [MvP: Multi-view Prompting Improves Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12627/) (2023)
- [Improving Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction via Template-Order Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10291/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Adaptation for Sequence Tagging and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12405/) (2020)
- [Joint Aspect and Polarity Classification for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with End-to-End Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09238/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Opinion Target Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09122/) (2019)
- [CL-XABSA: Contrastive Learning for Cross-lingual Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00791/) (2022)
- [Czech Dataset for Complex Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08125/) (2025)
- [LLaMA-Based Models for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08649/) (2025)
- [Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: A Survey on Tasks, Approaches, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09516/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [When Distributions Shifts: Causal Generalization for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27512/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has made substantial progress, challenges remain for low-resource languages, which are often overlooked in favour of English. Current cross-lingual ABSA approaches focus on limited, less complex tasks and often rely on external translation tools. This paper introduces a novel approach using constrained decoding with sequence-to-sequence models, eliminating the need for unreliable translation tools and improving cross-lingual performance by 5% on average for the most complex task. The proposed method also supports multi-tasking, which enables solving multiple ABSA tasks with a single model, with constrained decoding boosting results by more than 10%. We evaluate our approach across seven languages and six ABSA tasks, surpassing state-of-the-art methods and setting new benchmarks for previously unexplored tasks. Additionally, we assess large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning scenarios. While LLMs perform poorly in zero-shot and few-shot settings, fine-tuning achieves competitive results compared to smaller multilingual models, albeit at the cost of longer training and inference times. We provide practical recommendations for real-world applications, enhancing the understanding of cross-lingual ABSA methodologies. This study offers valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of cross-lingual ABSA approaches, advancing the state-of-the-art in this challenging research domain.