Comparative Analysis of Deep Natural Networks and Large Language Models for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is essential for comprehending public opinion, particularly when considering e-commerce and the expansion of online businesses. Early approaches treated sentiment analysis as a document or sentence-level classification problem, lacking the ability to capture nuanced opinions about specific aspects. This limitation was addressed by the development of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), which links sentiment to specific aspects that are mentioned explicitly or implicitly in the review. ABSA is relatively a recent field of sentiment analysis and the existing models for ABSA face three main challenges, including domain-specificity, reliance on labeled data, and a lack of exploration into the potential of newer large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, PaLM, and T5. Leveraging a diverse set of datasets, including DOTSA, MAMS, and SemEval16, we evaluate the performance of prominent models such as ATAE-LSTM, flan-t5-large-absa, DeBERTa, PaLM, and GPT-3.5-Turbo. Our findings reveal nuanced strengths and weaknesses of these models across different domains, with DeBERTa emerging as consistently high-performing and PaLM demonstrating remarkable competitiveness for aspect term sentiment analysis (ATSA) tasks. In addition, the PaLM demonstrates competitive performance for all the domains that were used in the experiments including the restaurant, hotel, books, clothing, and laptop reviews. Notably, the analysis underscores the models' domain sensitivity, shedding light on their varying efficacy for both ATSA and ACSA tasks. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of model applicability and highlight potential areas for improvement in ABSA research and development.