Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis for Bengali Text using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)

Abstract

Public opinion is important for decision-making on numerous occasions for national growth in democratic countries like Bangladesh, the USA, and India. Sentiment analysis is a technique used to determine the polarity of opinions expressed in a text. The more complex stage of sentiment analysis is known as Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), where it is possible to ascertain both the actual topics being discussed by the speakers as well as the polarity of each opinion. Nowadays, people leave comments on a variety of websites, including social networking sites, online news sources, and even YouTube video comment sections, on a wide range of topics. ABSA can play a significant role in utilizing these comments for a variety of objectives, including academic, commercial, and socioeconomic development. In English and many other popular European languages, there are many datasets for ABSA, but the Bengali language has very few of them. As a result, ABSA research on Bengali is relatively rare. In this paper, we present a Bengali dataset that has been manually annotated with five aspects and their corresponding sentiment. A baseline evaluation was also carried out using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, with 97% aspect detection accuracy and 77% sentiment classification accuracy. For aspect detection, the F1-score was 0.97 and for sentiment classification, it was 0.77.