Sentiment analysis is increasingly viewed as a vital task both from an academic and a commercial standpoint. The majority of current approaches, however, attempt to detect the overall polarity of a sentence, paragraph, or text span, regardless of the entities mentioned (e.g., laptops, restaurants) and their aspects (e.g., battery, screen; food, service). By contrast, this task is concerned with aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA), where the goal is to identify the aspects of given target entities and the sentiment expressed towards each aspect. Datasets consisting of customer reviews with human-authored annotations identifying the mentioned aspects of the target entities and the sentiment polarity of each aspect will be provided.

Subtask 2: Aspect term polarity

For a given set of aspect terms within a sentence, determine whether the polarity of each aspect term is positive, negative, neutral or conflict (i.e., both positive and negative).

For example:

“I loved their fajitas” → {fajitas: positive} “I hated their fajitas, but their salads were great” → {fajitas: negative, salads: positive} “The fajitas are their first plate” → {fajitas: neutral} “The fajitas were great to taste, but not to see” → {fajitas: conflict}