ABSA-Bench: Towards the Unified Evaluation of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Research

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.