Opinion Units: Concise and Contextualized Representations for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Emil Häglund, Johanna Björklund


Abstract
We introduce opinion units, a contribution to the field Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) that extends aspect- sentiment pairs by including substantiating excerpts, derived through hybrid abstractive-extractive summarisation. The goal is to provide fine-grained information without sacrificing succinctness and abstraction. Evaluations on review datasets demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) can accurately extract opinion units through few-shot learning. The main types of errors are providing incomplete contexts for opinions and and mischaracterising objective statements as opinions. The method reduces the need for labelled data and allows the LLM to dynamically define aspect types. As a practical evaluation, we present a case study on similarity search across academic datasets and public review data. The results indicate that searches leveraging opinion units are more successful than those relying on traditional data-segmentation strategies, showing robustness across datasets and embeddings.
Anthology ID:
2025.nodalida-1.24
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)
Month:
march
Year:
2025
Address:
Tallinn, Estonia
Editors:
Richard Johansson, Sara Stymne
Venue:
NoDaLiDa
SIG:
Publisher:
University of Tartu Library
Note:
Pages:
230–240
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.nodalida-1.24/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emil Häglund and Johanna Björklund. 2025. Opinion Units: Concise and Contextualized Representations for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025), pages 230–240, Tallinn, Estonia. University of Tartu Library.
Cite (Informal):
Opinion Units: Concise and Contextualized Representations for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (Häglund & Björklund, NoDaLiDa 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.nodalida-1.24.pdf