Comparative Analysis of Recent Studies on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis as part of natural language processing (NLP) has received much attention following the demand to understand people's opinions. Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained subtask from sentiment analysis that aims to classify sentiment at the aspect level. Throughout the years, researchers have formulated ABSA into various tasks for different scenarios. Unlike the early works, the current ABSA utilizes many elements to improve performance and provide more details to produce informative results. These ABSA formulations have provided greater challenges for researchers. However, it is difficult to explore ABSA's works due to the many different formulations, terms, and results. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis of recent studies on ABSA. We mention some key elements, problem formulations, and datasets currently utilized by most ABSA communities. Also, we conduct a short review of the latest papers to find the current state-of-the-art model. From our observations, we found that span-level representation is an important feature in solving the ABSA problem, while multi-task learning and generative approach look promising. Finally, we review some open challenges and further directions for ABSA research in the future.