ChatASU: Evoking LLM’s Reflexion to Truly Understand Aspect Sentiment in Dialogues

Abstract

Aspect Sentiment Understanding (ASU) in interactive scenarios (e.g., Question-Answering and Dialogue) has attracted ever-more interest in recent years and achieved important progresses. However, existing studies on interactive ASU largely ignore the coreference issue for opinion targets (i.e., aspects), while this phenomenon is ubiquitous in interactive scenarios especially dialogues, limiting the ASU performance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) shows the powerful ability to integrate various NLP tasks with the chat paradigm. In this way, this paper proposes a new Chat-based Aspect Sentiment Understanding (ChatASU) task, aiming to explore LLMs’ ability in understanding aspect sentiments in dialogue scenarios. Particularly, this ChatASU task introduces a sub-task, i.e., Aspect Chain Reasoning (ACR) task, to address the aspect coreference issue. On this basis, we propose a Trusted Self-reflexion Approach (TSA) with ChatGLM as backbone to ChatASU. Specifically, this TSA treats the ACR task as an auxiliary task to boost the performance of the primary ASU task, and further integrates trusted learning into reflexion mechanisms to alleviate the LLMs-intrinsic factual hallucination problem in TSA. Furthermore, a high-quality ChatASU dataset is annotated to evaluate TSA, and extensive experiments show that our proposed TSA can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art baselines, justifying the effectiveness of TSA to ChatASU and the importance of considering the coreference and hallucination issues in ChatASU.