A Survey of Transformer and GNN for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis (SA) is one of the most active and rapidly developing research areas in both information retrieval and text mining fields of computer science. SA is the process of analysing, handling, generalizing, and reasoning about user sentiments, opinions, and emotions hidden within the text by using sentiment. There are various categories of levels of SA: (1) document-level, (2) sentence-level, and (3) aspect-level. This paper is focused on sorting out some Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) works. ABSA is one of the primary tasks in sentiment analysis, which involves identifying the expression of an opinion or sensation of an object in a particular dimension or feature. ABSA involves two primary subtasks: (1) aspect extraction and (2) aspect-based sentiment classification. In contrast to document-and sentence-based sentiment analysis, ABSA simultaneously considers sentiment and target information. Generally, the ABSA methods can be categorized into Transformer based ABSA and Graph Neural Network based ABSA. This paper introduces some popular frameworks, datasets, and evaluation metrics of ABSA tasks based on the above-proposed classification and methodology.