Feature distillation network for aspect-based sentiment analysis

•FDN is the first model to introduce the Double-Gate mechanism.•The Contextual Non-Linear Projection Layer significantly helps Double-Gate mechanism to improve the performance of FDN.•The FDN model achieves state-of-the-art results in two subtasks of ABSA which are ACSA subtask and ATSA subtask.•This paper visualizes how the Double-Gate mechanism works to improve the performance of the FDN.