  Target-oriented opinion words extraction (TOWE) is a new subtask of ABSA,
which aims to extract the corresponding opinion words for a given opinion
target in a sentence. Recently, neural network methods have been applied to
this task and achieve promising results. However, the difficulty of annotation
causes the datasets of TOWE to be insufficient, which heavily limits the
performance of neural models. By contrast, abundant review sentiment
classification data are easily available at online review sites. These reviews
contain substantial latent opinions information and semantic patterns. In this
paper, we propose a novel model to transfer these opinions knowledge from
resource-rich review sentiment classification datasets to low-resource task
TOWE. To address the challenges in the transfer process, we design an effective
transformation method to obtain latent opinions, then integrate them into TOWE.
Extensive experimental results show that our model achieves better performance
compared to other state-of-the-art methods and significantly outperforms the
base model without transferring opinions knowledge. Further analysis validates
the effectiveness of our model.

Computation and Language