Extensible Multi-Granularity Fusion Network and Transferable Curriculum Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to determine sentiment polarity toward specific aspects in text. Existing methods enrich semantic and syntactic representations through external knowledge or GNNs, but the growing diversity of linguistic features increases model complexity and lacks a unified, extensible framework. We propose an Extensible Multi-Granularity Fusion Network (EMGF) that integrates dependency syntax, constituent syntax, attention-based semantics, and external knowledge graphs. EMGF employs multi-anchor triplet learning and orthogonal projection to effectively fuse multi-granularity features and strengthen their interactions without additional computational overhead. Furthermore, we introduce the first task-specific curriculum learning framework for text-only ABSA, which assigns difficulty scores using five indicators and trains the model from easy to hard to mimic human learning and improve generalization. Experiments on SemEval 2014, Twitter, and MAMS datasets show that EMGF+CL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ABSA models.