# MASTE: A Multi-Agent Pipeline for Zero-Shot Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08080 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08080/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 10 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15005/) (2023)
- [Knowing What, How and Why: A Near Complete Solution for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01616/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Neural Aspect and Opinion Term Extraction with Mined Rules as Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03750/) (2019)
- [AgentRE: An Agent-Based Framework for Navigating Complex Information Landscapes in Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01854/) (2024)
- [Extracting Events Like Code: A Multi-Agent Programming Framework for Zero-Shot Event Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13118/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) requires jointly identifying (aspect, opinion, sentiment) triples from a given review sentence. While large language models (LLMs) achieve strong zero-shot performance on many NLP benchmarks, their effectiveness on ASTE remains limited, as single-pass generation forces the model to determine span boundaries, opinion grouping, and sentiment polarity in a single decoding step. Common remedies, such as few-shot in-context learning and chain-of-thought prompting, offer only marginal improvements and rely heavily on either in-domain demonstrations sampled from labeled training data or carefully engineered reasoning prompts, neither of which is broadly available in zero-shot deployment. Inspired by the classical agent paradigm, we propose MASTE, a multi-agent pipeline for zero-shot Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction. MASTE decomposes ASTE into four sequential stages, where specialized agents handle different compositional subtasks with explicit conditioning on prior outputs. This design enables entirely training-free zero-shot ASTE and generalizes across different backbones and datasets. Extensive experiments on four ASTE benchmarks show that MASTE substantially outperforms zero-shot and chain-of-thought LLM baselines under the same backbone, narrowing the gap to fully supervised methods without using any labeled triplets. Code is available at https://github.com/Hankerlove/MASTE.