Survey on Aspect-Level Sentiment Analysis

The field of sentiment analysis, in which sentiment is gathered, analyzed, and aggregated from text, has seen a lot of attention in the last few years. The corresponding growth of the field has resulted in the emergence of various subareas, each addressing a different level of analysis or research question. This survey focuses on aspect-level sentiment analysis, where the goal is to find and aggregate sentiment on entities mentioned within documents or aspects of them. An in-depth overview of the current state-of-the-art is given, showing the tremendous progress that has already been made in finding both the target, which can be an entity as such, or some aspect of it, and the corresponding sentiment. Aspect-level sentiment analysis yields very fine-grained sentiment information which can be useful for applications in various domains. Current solutions are categorized based on whether they provide a method for aspect detection, sentiment analysis, or both. Furthermore, a breakdown based on the type of algorithm used is provided. For each discussed study, the reported performance is included. To facilitate the quantitative evaluation of the various proposed methods, a call is made for the standardization of the evaluation methodology that includes the use of shared data sets. Semantically-rich concept-centric aspect-level sentiment analysis is discussed and identified as one of the most promising future research direction.

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