Aspect extraction in sentiment analysis: comparative analysis and survey

Sentiment analysis (SA) has become one of the most active and progressively popular areas in information retrieval and text mining due to the expansion of the World Wide Web (WWW). SA deals with the computational treatment or the classification of user's sentiments, opinions and emotions hidden within the text. Aspect extraction is the most vital and extensively explored phase of SA to carry out the classification of sentiments in precise manners. During the last decade, enormous number of research has focused on identifying and extracting aspects. Therefore, in this survey, a comprehensive overview has been attempted for different aspect extraction techniques and approaches. These techniques have been categorized in accordance with the adopted approach. Despite being a traditional survey, a comprehensive comparative analysis is conducted among different approaches of aspect extraction, which not only elaborates the performance of any technique but also guides the reader to compare the accuracy with other state-of-the-art and most recent approaches.