DimABSA: Building Multilingual and Multidomain Datasets for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

TL;DR

DimABSA introduces a multilingual, dimensional dataset for aspect-based sentiment analysis using continuous valence-arousal scores, enabling nuanced sentiment understanding across multiple languages and domains.

Contribution

It presents the first multilingual, dimensional ABSA dataset with VA scores, new subtasks, and a unified metric, advancing fine-grained sentiment analysis research.

Findings

DimABSA contains 76,958 aspect instances across six languages and four domains.

The dataset supports three subtasks combining VA scores with ABSA elements.

Benchmark results highlight the challenge and potential of dimensional ABSA.

Abstract

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) focuses on extracting sentiment at a fine-grained aspect level and has been widely applied across real-world domains. However, existing ABSA research relies on coarse-grained categorical labels (e.g., positive, negative), which limits its ability to capture nuanced affective states. To address this limitation, we adopt a dimensional approach that represents sentiment with continuous valence-arousal (VA) scores, enabling fine-grained analysis at both the aspect and sentiment levels. To this end, we introduce DimABSA, the first multilingual, dimensional ABSA resource annotated with both traditional ABSA elements (aspect terms, aspect categories, and opinion terms) and newly introduced VA scores. This resource contains 76,958 aspect instances across 42,590 sentences, spanning six languages and four domains. We further introduce three subtasks that combine VA scores with different ABSA elements, providing a bridge from traditional ABSA to dimensional ABSA. Given that these subtasks involve both categorical and continuous outputs, we propose a new unified metric, continuous F1 (cF1), which incorporates VA prediction error into standard F1. We provide a comprehensive benchmark using both prompted and fine-tuned large language models across all subtasks. Our results show that DimABSA is a challenging benchmark and provides a foundation for advancing multilingual dimensional ABSA. We publicly released the DimABSA dataset, which was used for Track A of SemEval-2026 Task 3, attracting over 300 participants.