SentiCSE: A Sentiment-aware Contrastive Sentence Embedding Framework with Sentiment-guided Textual Similarity

Recently, sentiment-aware pre-trained language models (PLMs) demonstrate impressive results in downstream sentiment analysis tasks. However, they neglect to evaluate the quality of their constructed sentiment representations; they just focus on improving the fine-tuning performance, which overshadows the representation quality. We argue that without guaranteeing the representation quality, their downstream performance can be highly dependent on the supervision of the fine-tuning data rather than representation quality. This problem would make them difficult to foray into other sentiment-related domains, especially where labeled data is scarce. We first propose Sentiment-guided Textual Similarity (SgTS), a novel metric for evaluating the quality of sentiment representations, which is designed based on the degree of equivalence in sentiment polarity between two sentences. We then propose SentiCSE, a novel Sentiment-aware Contrastive Sentence Embedding framework for constructing sentiment representations via combined word-level and sentence-level objectives, whose quality is guaranteed by SgTS. Qualitative and quantitative comparison with the previous sentiment-aware PLMs shows the superiority of our work.