Adaptive pre-training and collaborative fine-tuning: a win-win strategy to improve review analysis tasks

Summarizing user reviews and classifying user sentiment are two critical tasks for modern e-commerce platforms. These two tasks can benefit each other by capturing the shared linguistic features. However, such a relationship has not been fully exploited by existing research on domain-specific contextual representations. This work explores a win-win strategy for a multi-task framework with three stages: general pre-training, adaptive pre-training, and collaborative fine-tuning. The task-adaptive continual pre-training on a language model can obtain domain-specific contextual representations, further used to improve two related tasks, sentiment classification and review summarization during the collaborative fine-tuning. Meanwhile, to effectively capture sentiment-oriented domain-specific contextual representations, we introduce a novel task-adaptive pre-training procedure, which adds a sentiment prediction task during the adaptive pre-training. Extensive experiments conducted on two adaption scenarios of a general-to-single domain and a general-to-multiple domain show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods.