Aspect extraction is a widely researched field of natural language processing in which aspects are identified from the text as a means for information. For example, in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), aspects need to be first identified. Previous studies have introduced various approaches to increasing accuracy, although leaving room for further improvement. In a practical situation where the examined dataset is lacking labels, to fine-tune the process a novel unsupervised approach is proposed, combining a lexical rule-based approach with coreference resolution. The model increases accuracy through the recognition and removal of coreferring aspects. Experimental evaluations are performed on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating the greater performance of our approach to extracting coherent aspects through outperforming the baseline approaches.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA)has gained much attention in recent years. It is the task of identifying fine-grained opinionpolarity towards a specific aspect associated with a given target. However, there is a lack of benchmarking platform to provide a unified environment under consistent evaluation criteria for ABSA, resulting in the difficulties for fair comparisons. In this work, we address this issue and define a benchmark, ABSA-Bench, by unifying the evaluation protocols and the pre-processed publicly available datasets in a Web-based platform. ABSA-Bench provides two means of evaluations for participants to submit their predictions or models for online evaluation. Performances are ranked in the leader board and a discussion forum is supported to serve as a collaborative platform for academics and researchers to discuss queries.