Gated recurrent unit with multilingual universal sentence encoder for Arabic aspect-based sentiment analysis

The increasing interactive content in the Internet motivated researchers and data scientists to conduct Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) research to understand the various sentiments and the different aspects of a product in a single user's comment. Determining the various aspects along with their polarities (positive, negative, or neutral) from a single comment is a challenging problem. To this end, we have designed and developed a deep learning model based on Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) and features extracted using the Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder (MUSE). The proposed Pooled-GRU model trained on a Hotels’ Arabic reviews to address two ABSA tasks: (1) aspect extraction, and (2) aspect polarity classification. The proposed model achieved high results with 93.0% F1 score in the former task and 90.86% F1 score in the latter task. Our experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the baseline model and the related research methods evaluated on the same dataset. More precisely, our proposed model showed 62.1% improvement in the F1 score over the baseline model for the aspect extraction task and 15% improvement in the accuracy over the baseline model for the aspect polarity classification task.