Zhen Wu


2024

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Emotion-Anchored Contrastive Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
Fangxu Yu | Junjie Guo | Zhen Wu | Xinyu Dai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) involves detecting the underlying emotion behind each utterance within a conversation. Effectively generating representations for utterances remains a significant challenge in this task. Recent works propose various models to address this issue, but they still struggle with differentiating similar emotions such as excitement and happiness. To alleviate this problem, We propose an Emotion-Anchored Contrastive Learning (EACL) framework that can generate more distinguishable utterance representations for similar emotions. To achieve this, we utilize label encodings as anchors to guide the learning of utterance representations and design an auxiliary loss to ensure the effective separation of anchors for similar emotions. Moreover, an additional adaptation process is proposed to adapt anchors to serve as effective classifiers to improve classification performance. Across extensive experiments, our proposed EACL achieves state-of-the-art emotion recognition performance and exhibits superior performance on similar emotions. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yu-Fangxu/EACL.

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A Two-Agent Game for Zero-shot Relation Triplet Extraction
Ting Xu | Haiqin Yang | Fei Zhao | Zhen Wu | Xinyu Dai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Relation triplet extraction is a fundamental task in natural language processing that aims to identify semantic relationships between entities in text. It is particularly challenging in the zero-shot setting, i.e., zero-shot relation triplet extraction (ZeroRTE), where the relation sets between training and test are disjoint. Existing methods deal with this task by integrating relations into prompts, which may lack sufficient understanding of the unseen relations. To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel Two-Agent Game (TAG) approach to deliberate and debate the semantics of unseen relations. TAG consists of two agents, a generator and an extractor. They iteratively interact in three key steps: attempting, criticizing, and rectifying. This enables the agents to fully debate and understand the unseen relations. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvement over ALBERT-Large, BART, andGPT3.5, without incurring additional inference costs in all cases. Remarkably, our method outperforms strong baselines by a significant margin, achieving an impressive 6%-16% increase in F1 scores, particularly when dealingwith FewRel with five unseen relations.

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MultiSQL: A Schema-Integrated Context-Dependent Text2SQL Dataset with Diverse SQL Operations
Chunhui Li | Yifan Wang | Zhen Wu | Zhen Yu | Fei Zhao | Shujian Huang | Xinyu Dai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Text2SQL is a task that translates natural language into SQL statements. Context-dependent Text2SQL offers a more natural database interaction by simulating dialogues between users and databases, with CoSQL and SparC as representative datasets. Yet, these datasets struggle to accurately replicate real-world situations. To address this, we introduce MultiSQL, which extends them in three key aspects: (1) Diverse SQL Operations. We incorporate diverse SQL types such as Create, Update, and Insert to broaden the scope of SQL operations. (2) Schema-Integrated Context. We integrated query context with database schema dependencies to better depict database complexity. (3) Extended Dialogues. We expand dialogue length to better simulate long conversations and complex interactions. This multi-type, schema-integrated, context-dependent Text2SQL dataset comprises nearly 800 dialogue groups and over 9,000 interaction turns across 166 complex databases, offering a better benchmark for interactive user-database dialogue.Addressing MultiSQL’s challenges, we refined evaluation metrics to better capture diverse SQL types and schema dependencies. We designed a prompt framework that leverages historical data and self-refinement to accurately capture the dependency between text queries and database structures. Experiments with GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and LLaMA2-7B show both the effectiveness of our strategies and the challenges of MultiSQL. The datasets is available at https://github.com/grandchicken/MultiSQL.

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Evaluating Large Language Models on Social Signal Sensitivity: An Appraisal Theory Approach
Zhen Wu | Ritam Dutt | Carolyn Rose
Proceedings of the 1st Human-Centered Large Language Modeling Workshop

We present a framework to assess the sensitivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to textually embedded social signals using an Appraisal Theory perspective. We report on an experiment that uses prompts encoding three dimensions of social signals: Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation. In response to the prompt, an LLM generates both an analysis (Insight) and a conversational Response, which are analyzed in terms of sensitivity to the signals. We quantitatively evaluate the output text through topical analysis of the Insight and predicted social intelligence scores of the Response in terms of empathy and emotional polarity. Key findings show that LLMs are more sensitive to positive signals. The personas impact Responses but not the Insight. We discuss how our framework can be extended to a broader set of social signals, personas, and scenarios to evaluate LLM behaviors under various conditions.

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Leveraging Machine-Generated Rationales to Facilitate Social Meaning Detection in Conversations
Ritam Dutt | Zhen Wu | Jiaxin Shi | Divyanshu Sheth | Prakhar Gupta | Carolyn Rose
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present a generalizable classification approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to facilitate the detection of implicitly encoded social meaning in conversations. We design a multi-faceted prompt to extract a textual explanation of the reasoning that connects visible cues to underlying social meanings. These extracted explanations or rationales serve as augmentations to the conversational text to facilitate dialogue understanding and transfer. Our empirical results over 2,340 experimental settings demonstrate the significant positive impact of adding these rationales. Our findings hold true for in-domain classification, zero-shot, and few-shot domain transfer for two different social meaning detection tasks, each spanning two different corpora.

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Dr3: Ask Large Language Models Not to Give Off-Topic Answers in Open Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering
Yuan Gao | Yiheng Zhu | Yuanbin Cao | Yinzhi Zhou | Zhen Wu | Yujie Chen | Shenglan Wu | Haoyuan Hu | Xinyu Dai
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Open Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (ODMHQA) plays a crucial role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by aiming to answer complex questions through multi-step reasoning over retrieved information from external knowledge sources. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving ODMHQA owing to their capabilities including planning, reasoning, and utilizing tools. However, LLMs may generate off-topic answers when attempting to solve ODMHQA, namely the generated answers are irrelevant to the original questions. This issue of off-topic answers accounts for approximately one-third of incorrect answers, yet remains underexplored despite its significance. To alleviate this issue, we propose the Discriminate→Re-Compose→Re- Solve→Re-Decompose (Dr3) mechanism. Specifically, the Discriminator leverages the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs to judge whether the generated answers are off-topic. In cases where an off-topic answer is detected, the Corrector performs step-wise revisions along the reversed reasoning chain (Re-Compose→Re-Solve→Re-Decompose) until the final answer becomes on-topic. Experimental results on the HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA datasets demonstrate that our Dr3 mechanism considerably reduces the occurrence of off-topic answers in ODMHQA by nearly 13%, improving the performance in Exact Match (EM) by nearly 3% compared to the baseline method without the Dr3 mechanism.

2023

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On Prefix-tuning for Lightweight Out-of-distribution Detection
Yawen Ouyang | Yongchang Cao | Yuan Gao | Zhen Wu | Jianbing Zhang | Xinyu Dai
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, a fundamental task vexing real-world applications, has attracted growing attention in the NLP community. Recently fine-tuning based methods have made promising progress. However, it could be costly to store fine-tuned models for each scenario. In this paper, we depart from the classic fine-tuning based OOD detection toward a parameter-efficient alternative, and propose an unsupervised prefix-tuning based OOD detection framework termed PTO. Additionally, to take advantage of optional training data labels and targeted OOD data, two practical extensions of PTO are further proposed. Overall, PTO and its extensions offer several key advantages of being lightweight, easy-to-reproduce, and theoretically justified. Experimental results show that our methods perform comparably to, even better than, existing fine-tuning based OOD detection approaches under a wide range of metrics, detection settings, and OOD types.

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Measuring Your ASTE Models in The Wild: A Diversified Multi-domain Dataset For Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction
Ting Xu | Huiyun Yang | Zhen Wu | Jiaze Chen | Fei Zhao | Xinyu Dai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is widely used in various applications. However, existing ASTE datasets are limited in their ability to represent real-world scenarios, hindering the advancement of research in this area. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, named DMASTE, which is manually annotated to better fit real-world scenarios by providing more diverse and realistic reviews for the task. The dataset includes various lengths, diverse expressions, more aspect types, and more domains than existing datasets. We conduct extensive experiments on DMASTE in multiple settings to evaluate previous ASTE approaches. Empirical results demonstrate that DMASTE is a more challenging ASTE dataset. Further analyses of in-domain and cross-domain settings provide some promising directions for future research.

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A Sequence-to-Structure Approach to Document-level Targeted Sentiment Analysis
Nan Song | Hongjie Cai | Rui Xia | Jianfei Yu | Zhen Wu | Xinyu Dai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Most previous studies on aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) were carried out at the sentence level, while the research of document-level ABSA has not received enough attention. In this work, we focus on the document-level targeted sentiment analysis task, which aims to extract the opinion targets consisting of multi-level entities from a review document and predict their sentiments. We propose a Sequence-to-Structure (Seq2Struct) approach to address the task, which is able to explicitly model the hierarchical structure among multiple opinion targets in a document, and capture the long-distance dependencies among affiliated entities across sentences. In addition to the existing Seq2Seq approach, we further construct four strong baselines with different pretrained models. Experimental results on six domains show that our Seq2Struct approach outperforms all the baselines significantly. Aside from the performance advantage in outputting the multi-level target-sentiment pairs, our approach has another significant advantage - it can explicitly display the hierarchical structure of the opinion targets within a document. Our source code is publicly released at https://github.com/NUSTM/Doc-TSA-Seq2Struct.

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Debias NLU Datasets via Training-free Perturbations
Qi Guo | Yuanhang Tang | Yawen Ouyang | Zhen Wu | Xinyu Dai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Several recent studies have shown that advanced models for natural language understanding (NLU) are prone to capture biased features that are independent of the task but spuriously correlated to labels. Such models often perform well on in-distribution (ID) datasets but fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. Existing solutions can be separated into two orthogonal approaches: model-centric methods and data-centric methods. Model-centric methods improve OOD performance at the expense of ID performance. Data-centric strategies usually boost both of them via data-level manipulations such as generative data augmentation. However, the high cost of fine-tuning a generator to produce valid samples limits the potential of such approaches. To address this issue, we propose PDD, a framework that conducts training-free Perturbations on samples containing biased features to Debias NLU Datasets. PDD works by iteratively conducting perturbations via pre-trained mask language models (MLM). PDD exhibits the advantage of low cost by adopting a training-free perturbation strategy and further improves the label consistency by utilizing label information during perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PDD shows competitive performance with previous state-of-the-art debiasing strategies. When combined with the model-centric debiasing methods, PDD establishes a new state-of-the-art.

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M2DF: Multi-grained Multi-curriculum Denoising Framework for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Fei Zhao | Chunhui Li | Zhen Wu | Yawen Ouyang | Jianbing Zhang | Xinyu Dai
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) is a fine-grained Sentiment Analysis task, which has attracted growing research interests recently. Existing work mainly utilizes image information to improve the performance of MABSA task. However, most of the studies overestimate the importance of images since there are many noise images unrelated to the text in the dataset, which will have a negative impact on model learning. Although some work attempts to filter low-quality noise images by setting thresholds, relying on thresholds will inevitably filter out a lot of useful image information. Therefore, in this work, we focus on whether the negative impact of noisy images can be reduced without modifying the data. To achieve this goal, we borrow the idea of Curriculum Learning and propose a Multi-grained Multi-curriculum Denoising Framework (M2DF), which can achieve denoising by adjusting the order of training data. Extensive experimental results show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art work on three sub-tasks of MABSA.

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Addressing Linguistic Bias through a Contrastive Analysis of Academic Writing in the NLP Domain
Robert Ridley | Zhen Wu | Jianbing Zhang | Shujian Huang | Xinyu Dai
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

It has been well documented that a reviewer’s opinion of the nativeness of expression in an academic paper affects the likelihood of it being accepted for publication. Previous works have also shone a light on the stress and anxiety authors who are non-native English speakers experience when attempting to publish in international venues. We explore how this might be a concern in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) through conducting a comprehensive statistical analysis of NLP paper abstracts, identifying how authors of different linguistic backgrounds differ in the lexical, morphological, syntactic and cohesive aspects of their writing. Through our analysis, we identify that there are a number of characteristics that are highly variable across the different corpora examined in this paper. This indicates potential for the presence of linguistic bias. Therefore, we outline a set of recommendations to publishers of academic journals and conferences regarding their guidelines and resources for prospective authors in order to help enhance inclusivity and fairness.

2022

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Label-Driven Denoising Framework for Multi-Label Few-Shot Aspect Category Detection
Fei Zhao | Yuchen Shen | Zhen Wu | Xinyu Dai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Multi-Label Few-Shot Aspect Category Detection (FS-ACD) is a new sub-task of aspect-based sentiment analysis, which aims to detect aspect categories accurately with limited training instances. Recently, dominant works use the prototypical network to accomplish this task, and employ the attention mechanism to extract keywords of aspect category from the sentences to produce the prototype for each aspect. However, they still suffer from serious noise problems: (1) due to lack of sufficient supervised data, the previous methods easily catch noisy words irrelevant to the current aspect category, which largely affects the quality of the generated prototype; (2) the semantically-close aspect categories usually generate similar prototypes, which are mutually noisy and confuse the classifier seriously. In this paper, we resort to the label information of each aspect to tackle the above problems, along with proposing a novel Label-Driven Denoising Framework (LDF). Extensive experimental results show that our framework achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

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Towards Multi-label Unknown Intent Detection
Yawen Ouyang | Zhen Wu | Xinyu Dai | Shujian Huang | Jiajun Chen
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Multi-class unknown intent detection has made remarkable progress recently. However, it has a strong assumption that each utterance has only one intent, which does not conform to reality because utterances often have multiple intents. In this paper, we propose a more desirable task, multi-label unknown intent detection, to detect whether the utterance contains the unknown intent, in which each utterance may contain multiple intents. In this task, the unique utterances simultaneously containing known and unknown intents make existing multi-class methods easy to fail. To address this issue, we propose an intuitive and effective method to recognize whether All Intents contained in the utterance are Known (AIK). Our high-level idea is to predict the utterance’s intent number, then check whether the utterance contains the same number of known intents. If the number of known intents is less than the number of intents, it implies that the utterance also contains unknown intents. We benchmark AIK over existing methods, and empirical results suggest that our method obtains state-of-the-art performances. For example, on the MultiWOZ 2.3 dataset, AIK significantly reduces the FPR95 by 12.25% compared to the best baseline.

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Learning from Adjective-Noun Pairs: A Knowledge-enhanced Framework for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification
Fei Zhao | Zhen Wu | Siyu Long | Xinyu Dai | Shujian Huang | Jiajun Chen
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Target-oriented multimodal sentiment classification (TMSC) is a new subtask of aspect-based sentiment analysis, which aims to determine the sentiment polarity of the opinion target mentioned in a (sentence, image) pair. Recently, dominant works employ the attention mechanism to capture the corresponding visual representations of the opinion target, and then aggregate them as evidence to make sentiment predictions. However, they still suffer from two problems: (1) The granularity of the opinion target in two modalities is inconsistent, which causes visual attention sometimes fail to capture the corresponding visual representations of the target; (2) Even though it is captured, there are still significant differences between the visual representations expressing the same mood, which brings great difficulty to sentiment prediction. To this end, we propose a novel Knowledge-enhanced Framework (KEF) in this paper, which can successfully exploit adjective-noun pairs extracted from the image to improve the visual attention capability and sentiment prediction capability of the TMSC task. Extensive experimental results show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art works on two public datasets.

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Exploiting Unlabeled Data for Target-Oriented Opinion Words Extraction
Yidong Wang | Hao Wu | Ao Liu | Wenxin Hou | Zhen Wu | Jindong Wang | Takahiro Shinozaki | Manabu Okumura | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction (TOWE) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to extract the corresponding opinion words of a given opinion target from the sentence. Recently, deep learning approaches have made remarkable progress on this task. Nevertheless, the TOWE task still suffers from the scarcity of training data due to the expensive data annotation process. Limited labeled data increase the risk of distribution shift between test data and training data. In this paper, we propose exploiting massive unlabeled data to reduce the risk by increasing the exposure of the model to varying distribution shifts. Specifically, we propose a novel Multi-Grained Consistency Regularization (MGCR) method to make use of unlabeled data and design two filters specifically for TOWE to filter noisy data at different granularity. Extensive experimental results on four TOWE benchmark datasets indicate the superiority of MGCR compared with current state-of-the-art methods. The in-depth analysis also demonstrates the effectiveness of the different-granularity filters.

2021

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UniDrop: A Simple yet Effective Technique to Improve Transformer without Extra Cost
Zhen Wu | Lijun Wu | Qi Meng | Yingce Xia | Shufang Xie | Tao Qin | Xinyu Dai | Tie-Yan Liu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Transformer architecture achieves great success in abundant natural language processing tasks. The over-parameterization of the Transformer model has motivated plenty of works to alleviate its overfitting for superior performances. With some explorations, we find simple techniques such as dropout, can greatly boost model performance with a careful design. Therefore, in this paper, we integrate different dropout techniques into the training of Transformer models. Specifically, we propose an approach named UniDrop to unites three different dropout techniques from fine-grain to coarse-grain, i.e., feature dropout, structure dropout, and data dropout. Theoretically, we demonstrate that these three dropouts play different roles from regularization perspectives. Empirically, we conduct experiments on both neural machine translation and text classification benchmark datasets. Extensive results indicate that Transformer with UniDrop can achieve around 1.5 BLEU improvement on IWSLT14 translation tasks, and better accuracy for the classification even using strong pre-trained RoBERTa as backbone.

2020

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Attention Transfer Network for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification
Fei Zhao | Zhen Wu | Xinyu Dai
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Aspect-level sentiment classification (ASC) aims to detect the sentiment polarity of a given opinion target in a sentence. In neural network-based methods for ASC, most works employ the attention mechanism to capture the corresponding sentiment words of the opinion target, then aggregate them as evidence to infer the sentiment of the target. However, aspect-level datasets are all relatively small-scale due to the complexity of annotation. Data scarcity causes the attention mechanism sometimes to fail to focus on the corresponding sentiment words of the target, which finally weakens the performance of neural models. To address the issue, we propose a novel Attention Transfer Network (ATN) in this paper, which can successfully exploit attention knowledge from resource-rich document-level sentiment classification datasets to improve the attention capability of the aspect-level sentiment classification task. In the ATN model, we design two different methods to transfer attention knowledge and conduct experiments on two ASC benchmark datasets. Extensive experimental results show that our methods consistently outperform state-of-the-art works. Further analysis also validates the effectiveness of ATN.

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Grid Tagging Scheme for Aspect-oriented Fine-grained Opinion Extraction
Zhen Wu | Chengcan Ying | Fei Zhao | Zhifang Fan | Xinyu Dai | Rui Xia
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Aspect-oriented Fine-grained Opinion Extraction (AFOE) aims at extracting aspect terms and opinion terms from review in the form of opinion pairs or additionally extracting sentiment polarity of aspect term to form opinion triplet. Because of containing several opinion factors, the complete AFOE task is usually divided into multiple subtasks and achieved in the pipeline. However, pipeline approaches easily suffer from error propagation and inconvenience in real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel tagging scheme, Grid Tagging Scheme (GTS), to address the AFOE task in an end-to-end fashion only with one unified grid tagging task. Additionally, we design an effective inference strategy on GTS to exploit mutual indication between different opinion factors for more accurate extractions. To validate the feasibility and compatibility of GTS, we implement three different GTS models respectively based on CNN, BiLSTM, and BERT, and conduct experiments on the aspect-oriented opinion pair extraction and opinion triplet extraction datasets. Extensive experimental results indicate that GTS models outperform strong baselines significantly and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

2019

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Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction with Target-fused Neural Sequence Labeling
Zhifang Fan | Zhen Wu | Xin-Yu Dai | Shujian Huang | Jiajun Chen
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Opinion target extraction and opinion words extraction are two fundamental subtasks in Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Recently, many methods have made progress on these two tasks. However, few works aim at extracting opinion targets and opinion words as pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel sequence labeling subtask for ABSA named TOWE (Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction), which aims at extracting the corresponding opinion words for a given opinion target. A target-fused sequence labeling neural network model is designed to perform this task. The opinion target information is well encoded into context by an Inward-Outward LSTM. Then left and right contexts of the opinion target and the global context are combined to find the corresponding opinion words. We build four datasets for TOWE based on several popular ABSA benchmarks from laptop and restaurant reviews. The experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the other compared methods significantly. We believe that our work may not only be helpful for downstream sentiment analysis task, but can also be used for pair-wise opinion summarization.