An aspect-based sentiment analysis model for Arabic game reviews based on hybrid transformers models

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a natural language processing (NLP) technique to determine the various sentiments of a customer in a single comment regarding different aspects. The increasing online data content generated by interested customers and reviewers motivated researchers and data scientists to conduct ABSA. ABSA has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its versatility in e-commerce, social media, and customer feedback analysis. However, ABSA faces several significant challenges, including determining the aspects and their sentiment polarities (positive, negative, or neutral) in a given text. Moreover, ABSA faces particular challenges in non-English languages such as Arabic due to the lack of resources and mature models. Typically, ABSA tackles one or more of the ABSA research tasks: (T1) aspect term extraction, (T2) aspect term polarity, (T3) aspect category identification, and (T4) aspect category polarity. To identify the aspects and their corresponding sentiment polarities in a given text, accurate and efficient NLP techniques are required. Despite growing interest in Arabic ABSA, the lack of annotated datasets and pre-trained models has hindered its development. In this research, we have collected a dataset of Arabic game reviews and annotated them using three annotators, and then we trained an ABSA deep learning model based on the BERT pre-trained model combined with zero-shot learning (ZSL) to tackle all the four aforementioned tasks. Our best performing model achieved a high accuracy on all four tasks with an accuracy of 91.61% on T1, 90.99% on T2, 79.08% on T3, and 88.17% on T4. Finally, we compared our model’s accuracy with the state-of-the-art Arabic-based ABSA models on different datasets. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2025.