Targeted Distillation for Sentiment Analysis

Abstract: This paper presents a compact model that achieves strong sentiment analysis capabilities through targeted distillation from advanced LLMs. Our methodology decouples the distillation target into two key components: sentiment-related knowledge and task alignment. To transfer these components, we propose a two-stage distillation framework. The first stage, knowledge-driven distillation (\textsc{KnowDist}), transfers sentiment-related knowledge to enhance fundamental sentiment analysis capabilities. The second stage, in-context learning distillation (\textsc{ICLDist}), transfers task-specific prompt-following abilities to optimize task alignment. For evaluation, we introduce \textsc{SentiBench}, a comprehensive sentiment analysis benchmark comprising 3 task categories across 12 datasets. Experiments on this benchmark demonstrate that our model effectively balances model size and performance, showing strong competitiveness compared to existing small-scale LLMs.