Beyond Cosine Similarity: Zero-Initialized Residual Complex Projection for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) faces critical challenges due to representation entanglement and false-negative collisions in real-valued embedding spaces. In this paper, we propose a novel framework featuring a Zero-Initialized Residual Complex Projection (ZRCP) and an Anti-collision Masked Angle Loss. Our approach projects textual features into a complex semantic space, utilizing the phase to isolate sentiment polarities while regularizing the amplitude to ensure structural consistency within aspect categories. To mitigate this, we introduce an anti-collision mask that preserves intra-polarity aspect cohesion while significantly expanding the discriminative margin between opposing polarities. Experimental results on the ASAP dataset demonstrate that our framework achieves a state-of-the-art Macro-F1 score of 0.8923, outperforming robust baselines.