A Survey on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: Tasks, Methods, and Challenges

TL;DR

This survey reviews aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), categorizing tasks and solutions, emphasizing recent advances with pre-trained models, and discussing challenges and future directions in the field.

Contribution

It provides a new taxonomy for ABSA tasks, summarizes recent solution strategies including pre-trained models, and discusses cross-domain and emerging challenges.

Findings

Pre-trained language models have significantly improved ABSA performance.

Compound ABSA tasks capture more comprehensive aspect-level sentiment information.

Cross-domain and multilingual ABSA are active research areas.

Abstract

As an important fine-grained sentiment analysis problem, aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), aiming to analyze and understand people's opinions at the aspect level, has been attracting considerable interest in the last decade. To handle ABSA in different scenarios, various tasks are introduced for analyzing different sentiment elements and their relations, including the aspect term, aspect category, opinion term, and sentiment polarity. Unlike early ABSA works focusing on a single sentiment element, many compound ABSA tasks involving multiple elements have been studied in recent years for capturing more complete aspect-level sentiment information. However, a systematic review of various ABSA tasks and their corresponding solutions is still lacking, which we aim to fill in this survey. More specifically, we provide a new taxonomy for ABSA which organizes existing studies from the axes of concerned sentiment elements, with an emphasis on recent advances of compound ABSA tasks. From the perspective of solutions, we summarize the utilization of pre-trained language models for ABSA, which improved the performance of ABSA to a new stage. Besides, techniques for building more practical ABSA systems in cross-domain/lingual scenarios are discussed. Finally, we review some emerging topics and discuss some open challenges to outlook potential future directions of ABSA.