Arabic aspect based sentiment analysis using BERT

Aspect-based sentiment analysis(ABSA) is a textual analysis methodology that defines the polarity of opinions on certain aspects related to specific targets. The majority of research on ABSA is in English, with a small amount of work available in Arabic. Most previous Arabic research has relied on deep learning models that depend primarily on context-independent word embeddings (e.g.word2vec), where each word has a fixed representation independent of its context. This article explores the modeling capabilities of contextual embeddings from pre-trained language models, such as BERT, and making use of sentence pair input on Arabic ABSA tasks. In particular, we are building a simple but effective BERT-based neural baseline to handle this task. Our BERT architecture with a simple linear classification layer surpassed the state-of-the-art works, according to the experimental results on the benchmarked Arabic hotel reviews dataset.