Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis on Amharic Text for Evaluating Ethio-Telecom Services

People are increasingly expressing their views and opinions about a company's goods or service on social media these days. For all types of businesses and organizations, sentiment analysis in text can be used to find prospective customers and obtain quick feedback on the services or goods they provided. As a result, the organization has a better chance and opportunity to meet the needs of the consumer. Using sentiment analysis, we may extract important information from the thoughts and emotions of an organization's supporters and clients. It examines natural language content produced about services and goods. Detailed opinion mining at the aspect/feature level to serve consumer and organizational needs. In this study, three different machine learning algorithms, these are Naïve Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and K- Nearest Neighbor (KNN) are used to build the proposed aspect-based sentiment analysis model from the customer comments in Amharic text which is collected from Ethio-telecom official Facebook page. The collected data is annotated into sentiment polarity and aspect-based sentiment classes by the help of five annotators. After data annotation, different preprocessing tasks were implemented. Bag of words and TF-IDF word representation techniques were used to represent each unique word to their vector representation. The experiment was conducted on those three models and the result was validated. The labeled aspects were not balanced so that a SMOTE class imbalance handling technique was employed to the dataset. Finally, SVM model trained with TF-IDF word representation technique with SMOTE oversampled dataset has achieved the highest accuracy result of 98% as compared to NB and KNN.