SentiFuse: Hierarchical Sentiment-Aware Pre-Training with Aspect-Level Contrastive Learning for Multi-Domain Sentiment Analysis
Keywords:
Sentiment analysis; Aspect-based sentiment analysis; Transformer models; Contrastive learning; Pre-trained language models; Transfer learning; Opinion mining; Domain adaptationAbstract
Sentiment analysis is a core task in natural language processing with wide-ranging applications in opinion mining, market intelligence, and social media analytics. Despite impressive progress on single-domain benchmarks, state-of-the-art transformer models still exhibit substantial performance degradation when applied across domains with divergent linguistic styles and aspect vocabularies a phenomenon we term cross-domain sentiment brittleness. In this paper, we propose SentiFuse, a hierarchical sentiment-aware pre-training framework that incorporates aspect-level contrastive learning to build representations that generalize robustly across domains. SentiFuse introduces three components: (i) a Sentiment-Masked Language Model (SMLM) pre-training objective that selectively masks sentiment-bearing tokens to encourage the model to learn polarity-grounded contextual representations; (ii) an Aspect-Level Contrastive (ALC) loss that pulls together representations of the same aspect expressed with different sentiment carriers, while pushing apart conflicting sentiments on the same aspect; and (iii) a Hierarchical Sentiment Aggregation (HSA) decoder that integrates token-, phrase-, and sentence-level sentiment signals during fine-tuning. We evaluate SentiFuse on four widely-used real-world benchmark datasets: SST-2 (Stanford Sentiment Treebank), IMDb Large Movie Reviews, SemEval-2014 Task 4 (Laptop and Restaurant), and Amazon Product Reviews (Electronics). SentiFuse achieves accuracy of 97.3% on SST-2, 97.8% on IMDb, macro-F1 of 88.6% on SemEval-2014 Laptop, and 91.2% on SemEval-2014 Restaurant, surpassing DeBERTa-large by margins of 0.8%, 0.4%, 3.1%, and 2.4% respectively. Ablation studies confirm that all three components contribute meaningfully, with the ALC loss yielding the largest gain (+1.9% on SemEval Laptop). Our analysis demonstrates that SentiFuse transfers sentiment knowledge more reliably across product categories and review genres than domain-agnostic pre-training alone.
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