data

Data Descriptor
Datasets for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis in
Bangla and Its Baseline Evaluation
Md. Atikur Rahman * and Emon Kumar Dey *
Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh
* Correspondence: bsse0521@iit.du.ac.bd (M.A.R.); emonkd@iit.du.ac.bd (E.K.D.)




Received: 20 March 2018; Accepted: 2 May 2018; Published: 4 May 2018


Abstract: With the extensive growth of user interactions through prominent advances of the Web,
sentiment analysis has obtained more focus from an academic and a commercial point of view.
Recently, sentiment analysis in the Bangla language is progressively being considered as an important
task, for which previous approaches have attempted to detect the overall polarity of a Bangla
document. To the best of our knowledge, there is no research on the aspect-based sentiment analysis
(ABSA) of Bangla text. This can be described as being due to the lack of available datasets for ABSA.
In this paper, we provide two publicly available datasets to perform the ABSA task in Bangla. One of
the datasets consists of human-annotated user comments on cricket, and the other dataset consists
of customer reviews of restaurants. We also describe a baseline approach for the subtask of aspect
category extraction to evaluate our datasets.

Dataset: https://github.com/AtikRahman/Bangla_ABSA_Datasets

Dataset License: CC0

Keywords: ABSA dataset; Bangla ABSA; aspect extraction from Bangla

1. Summary
People trust human opinion more so than traditional advertising. For example, consumers are
used to seeking advice and recommendation from others before making decisions regarding important
purchases. Word of mouth (WOM) has always been salient for consumers when making a decision.
Such referrals have a strong impact on both customer decision-making and new customer acquisition
for the purchasing of a company’s product or service [1]. On the other hand, organizations are
eager to mine all the activities and interactions of people to understand what their weaknesses and
strengths are. This understanding would help them to develop their organizational strategy in this
competitive world.
Sentiment analysis (or opinion mining) is a process to determine the viewpoint of a person on
a certain topic. It classifies the polarity of a document (i.e., review, tweet, blog, or news), that is,
whether the communicated opinion is positive, negative, or neutral. There are three levels at which
sentiment is analyzed [2]: the document level, sentence level, and aspect level. The document level
considers that a document has an opinion on an entity, and the task is to classify whether an entire
document expresses a positive or negative sentiment. The task at the sentence level regards sentences
and determining whether each sentence expresses a positive, negative, or neutral opinion. Neither
the document level nor the sentence level analysis discover exactly what people liked and did not
like. The aspect level (or aspect-based sentiment analysis—ABSA) performs a finer-grained analysis
that identifies the aspects of a given document or sentence and the sentiment expressed towards

Data 2018, 3, 15; doi:10.3390/data3020015 www.mdpi.com/journal/data

Data 2018, 3, 15 2 of 10

each aspect. This level of analysis is the most detailed version that is capable of discovering complex
opinions from reviews.
There are two major tasks when performing ABSA. The first is to extract the specific areas or
aspects mentioned in the opinioned review. The second is to identify the polarity (either positive,
negative, or neutral) for every aspect. For example, the following review of a restaurant reveals
two aspects: service and food. Both aspects have a positive polarity.
“The service was excellent and the food was delicious.”
As one can see, the name of the aspect categories are explicitly mentioned in this review. A review
might also contain implicit categories; for example, “The staff makes you feel at home and the chicken is
great.” Here, the same aspects, “service” and “food”, are contained without being directly mentioned.
Semantic Evaluation (SemEval), a reputed workshop in the NLP domain, introduced a complete
dataset [3] in English for the ABSA task. Later this was expanded to the ABSA task by adding
multi-lingual datasets in which eight languages over seven domains were incorporated. To perform
ABSA, datasets of several languages, such as Arabic [4], Czech [5], and French [6], were created.
There is no dataset for Bangla in the field of ABSA. Consequently, no work is being done to extract
aspects and to identify corresponding polarities for Bangla reviews. We are currently working on a
project to extract the aspects from a Bangla review or comments for a particular product of a company,
as online shopping is very popular nowadays in Bangladesh and is growing rapidly. People like to
buy products online after reading the comments of others.
In this paper, we have created two new datasets that serve as a benchmark for the ABSA domain
in Bangla texts. We present two datasets named “Cricket” and “Restaurant”. The first dataset
contains 2900 comments on cricket over 5 aspect categories, and the second dataset contains 2600
restaurant reviews.
Because there is no work in Bangla for the ABSA task, we have introduced ABSA by extracting
aspect categories from Bangla texts in order to evaluate our datasets. We performed the task
with different training approaches and found a satisfactory outcome compared to evaluations of
other languages.
There are some related works from which we founded the idea of this topic. The restaurant
review dataset, provided by Ganu et al. [7], was used to improve rating predictions. Their annotations
included six aspect categories and overall sentence polarities. They had not prepared a complete ABSA
dataset, as the aspect category was present but the corresponding polarity of that aspect was absent.
The SemEval 2014 evaluation campaign [3] extended their dataset by adding three more fields with the
aspect category. They published their dataset with four fields being contained for each review, that is,
with the aspect term occurring in the sentences, the aspect term’s polarity, the aspect category, and the
aspect category’s polarity. They also provided a laptop-review dataset and manually annotated with
similar entities as for the restaurant dataset. These are the benchmark datasets that [8–11] researches
have used for performing the ABSA task.
The task was repeated in SemEval 2015 [12], for which aspect categories were the combination of
the entity type and an attribute type. Multilingual datasets were released in the SemEval 2016
workshop [13] on the seven domains (restaurant, laptop, mobile phone, digital camera, hotel,
and museum) and in eight languages (English, Arabic, French, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, Dutch,
and Russian).
A book-review dataset in the Arabic language was provided by [4]. They annotated book reviews
into 14 categories and 4 types of polarities, including “Conflict”. In [5], the author created an IT
product-review dataset for the ABSA task, in which a total 2200 reviews were contained.
The contribution of this paper is as follows:

• We have collected and presented two Bangla datasets for ABSA and have made them
publicly available.
• We performed statistical linguistic analysis on the datasets.
Data 2018, 3, 15 3 of 10

• We implemented state-of-the-art machine learning approaches for the collected datasets and
Data 2018, 3, x 3 of 11
found satisfactory accuracies.

2.2.Data
DataDescription
Description
“DigitalBangladesh”
“Digital Bangladesh”is is thethe integral
integral partpart ofBangladesh
of the the Bangladesh government’s
government’s VisionVision 2021.
2021. The The
Internet
Internet is growing very fast over the country, and people are using different online
is growing very fast over the country, and people are using different online platforms in every aspect platforms in
ofevery
theiraspect of their
lives. This lives. This
encouraged usencouraged
to constructus to construct
datasets datasets
to analyze to analyze
the Bengali the Bengali
people’s people’s
opinions and to
opinions and to extract their sentiments in different aspects. In this paper, we have constructed
extract their sentiments in different aspects. In this paper, we have constructed two different datasets, two
different datasets, namely, the Cricket dataset and Restaurant dataset,
namely, the Cricket dataset and Restaurant dataset, to evaluate the people’s opinions. to evaluate the people’s
opinions.
2.1. Cricket Dataset
2.1. Cricket Dataset
The Cricket dataset consists of 2900 different comments from different online sources with
The Cricket
five different dataset
aspect consists of 2900
categories. Mostdifferent
of the comments
commentsfrom are different
collectedonline
from sources
Facebookwithpages
five
different aspect categories. Most of the comments are collected
(https://www.facebook.com/BBCBengaliService/; https://www.facebook.com/DailyProthomAlo/). from Facebook pages
(https://www.facebook.com/BBCBengaliService/;
Some comments are collected from two popular Bengali https://www.facebook.com/DailyProthomAlo/).
Websites, BBC Bangla (http://www.bbc.com/
Some comments are collected from two
bengali), and the Daily Prothom Alo (http://www.prothomalo.com). popular Bengali Websites,
This dataset BBC Bangla
was collected by the
(http://www.bbc.com/bengali), and the Daily Prothom Alo (http://www.prothomalo.com).
authors of this paper. The comments are of different lengths and each review contains approximately This
dataset was collected by the authors of this paper. The comments are of different
3–100 Bangla words. The reasons behind choosing these Websites for collecting data are given below:lengths and each
review contains approximately 3–100 Bangla words. The reasons behind choosing these Websites for
•collecting data areand
BBC Bangla given
thebelow:
Daily Prothom Alo are very popular online news sites for the Bengali
 community
BBC Banglaall around
and the world.
the Daily They
Prothom Aloare popular
are for publishing
very popular trustworthy
online news sites forand
theauthentic
Bengali
news.
community all around the world. They are popular for publishing trustworthy and share
Bengali people frequently read the news and sometimes make comments to their
authentic
opinion.
news. Bengali people frequently read the news and sometimes make comments to share theirof
Although people write their comments or opinions in both Bangla and English, most
the time, they
opinion. choose
Although Bangla.
people Wetheir
write studied different
comments articles and
or opinions found
in both thatand
Bangla in almost
English,90%
mostof the
of
cases, people expressed their opinion in Bangla.
the time, they choose Bangla. We studied different articles and found that in almost 90% of the
• The Facebook
cases, page of Prothom
people expressed Alo has
their opinion over 13 million followers, and BBC Bangla has over
in Bangla.
 11 million.
The These
Facebook twoofpages
page provide
Prothom Alo enormous
has over 13text postsfollowers,
million as well as and
a large
BBCnumber
Banglaof comments.
has over 11
• million.isThese
Cricket one oftwo
thepages
mostprovide
popularenormous text postsfor
games nowadays as Bengali
well as apeople.
large number
We foundof comments.
that people
 Cricket
are moreisinterested
one of the in
most popular
making games nowadays
comments for Bengalinews
on cricket-related people.
thanWeonfound
any that people
other topic.
are more interested in making comments
Thus, we chose this category for our experiment. on cricket-related news than on any other topic. Thus,
we chose this category for our experiment.
Table 1 shows an example of comments collected from the Facebook pages.
Table 1 shows an example of comments collected from the Facebook pages.
Table 1. Example of cricket-related comments on Prothom Alo and BBC Bangla Facebook pages.
Table 1. Example of cricket-related comments on Prothom Alo and BBC Bangla Facebook pages.

Comments Source
মাশরািফ এক জাদুকারী নাম । য নামটা নেলই মন ভের যায়। আমােদর
Prothom Alo Facebook page
জিহর,জনসন, পালক, টিল নাই তেব এক জন মাশরািফ আেছ
বালারেদরও দাষ নই, দাষটা 100% ম ােনজেমে র। পস বালারেদর জন উইেকট তির তা
Prothom Alo Facebook page
তারাই কের না। দাষটা ম ােনজেম না মানেল আিম নব।
আশা কির তাসিকন অিত ত ু দেল িফরেব আর িনয়িমত খলেব এবং চর আউট করেব। Prothom Alo Facebook page
এখন দশকেদর কােছ জনি য় হে 20--- ট /ওয়ানেড মানুষ এখন দখেতই চায়না.. Prothom Alo Facebook page
হারেলও বাংলােদশ জতেলও বাংলােদশ।আগামীেত আবার আমরাই জতেবা। ইশ! আমােদর যিদ
BBC Bangla Facebook page
িবরাট কাহিলর মেতা একটা ব াট ান থাকেতা
আমার পরামশ হেলা েকটারেদর কেপােরট জগত থেক দুের রাখেত হেব। BBC Bangla Facebook page

Peopleusually
People usually comment
comment inin Bangla
Bangla about
about the
the news.
news. We
We also
also found
foundthat
that5–10%
5–10%of
ofthe
thetime,
time,they
they
commented in English and also wrote Bangla sentences written in the English alphabet. We did not
commented in English and also wrote Bangla sentences written in the English alphabet. We did not
consider these opinions in our dataset. In addition, some comments had only emoticons and no other
consider these opinions in our dataset. In addition, some comments had only emoticons and no
text or words. We also omitted these for our dataset. All of the processes were done manually by the
other text or words. We also omitted these for our dataset. All of the processes were done manually
authors. The following section describes the annotation process of the collected corpus of cricket-
by the authors. The following section describes the annotation process of the collected corpus of
related comments.
cricket-related comments.
2.1.1. Annotation of Cricket Dataset
The Bangla text on cricket was annotated jointly by the authors, a group of second-year students
of BSSE, and two employees from the Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka,
Data 2018, 3, 15 4 of 10

2.1.1. Annotation of Cricket Dataset

The Bangla text on cricket was annotated jointly by the authors, a group of second-year students
of BSSE, and two employees from the Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka,
Bangladesh. All participants agreed to categorize the whole dataset into five different aspect categories.
Data
These 2018,
were3,3,xbowling,
Data 2018, x batting, team, team management, and other. Given a comment,4 the of 114task
of 12 of

the annotators was to recommend the aspect category and polarity labels for each. Three types of
Bangladesh.
Bangladesh. All participants
participantsagreed
agreedtotocategorize
categorize the whole dataset into
five five different aspect
polarities were All
considered, that is, positive, negative,theandwhole dataset
neutral. Tableinto
2 shows different aspect
the information about
categories. These
These were bowling, batting, team, team management, and other. Given a comment, the
thecategories.
participants. were bowling, batting, team, team management, and other. Given a comment, the
task of the
theannotators
annotatorswas
wastotorecommend
recommend thethe aspect
aspect category
category andand polarity
polarity labels
labels for each.
for each. ThreeThree
typestypes
of polarities wereconsidered,
polarities were considered,that
thatis,is, positive,
positive, negative,
negative, andand neutral.
neutral. Table
Table 2 shows
2 shows the information
the information
Table 2. Information about the participants in data collection.
about the
the participants.
participants.
Participant ID Gender Profession Task
Table
Table2.2.Information
Informationabout thethe
about participants in data
participants collection.
in data collection.
P1 Male MS student/author Data collection (Cricket) and annotation
Participant
ParticipantID Gender
IDMale
Gender Profession
Profession TaskTask
P2 Faculty/author Data collection (Cricket) and annotation
P1
P1 Male MS student/author Data collection (Cricket) and annotation
P3 MaleMale MS student/author
Graduate student Data collection
Annotation (Cricket)
(Cricket) andand annotation
translation (Restaurant)
P2
P2 Male
Male Faculty/author
Faculty/author Data collection
Data (Cricket)
collection and annotation
(Cricket) and annotation
P4 Female Graduate student Annotation (Cricket) and translation (Restaurant)
P3 Male Graduate student Annotation (Cricket) and translation (Restaurant)
P5 P3 Female
Male Graduate
Graduate student Annotation
student Annotation (Cricket)
(Cricket) and translation
and translation (Restaurant)
(Restaurant)
P4 Female Graduate student Annotation (Cricket) and translation (Restaurant)
P6 P4 Male
Female Graduate
Graduate student Annotation
student Annotation (Cricket)
(Cricket) and translation
and translation (Restaurant)
(Restaurant)
P5 Female Graduate student Annotation (Cricket) and translation (Restaurant)
P7 P5 Male
Female Graduate
Graduate student Annotation
student Annotation (Cricket)
(Cricket) and translation
and translation (Restaurant)
(Restaurant)
P6 Male Graduate student Annotation (Cricket) and translation (Restaurant)
P8 P6 MaleMale Graduate
Graduate student Annotation
student Annotation (Cricket)
(Cricket) and translation
and translation (Restaurant)
(Restaurant)
P7 Male Graduate student Annotation (Cricket) and translation (Restaurant)
P9 P7 Female
Male Accountant
Graduate student Annotation (Cricket) andAnnotation
translation (Restaurant)
P8 Male Graduate student Annotation (Cricket) and translation (Restaurant)
P10 P8 MaleMale Officer
Graduate student Annotation (Cricket) andAnnotation
translation (Restaurant)
P9 Female Accountant Annotation
P9
P10 Female
Male Accountant
Officer Annotation
Annotation
P10 Male Officer Annotation
Each participant categorized every comment of the dataset. We applied the majority voting
Eachtoparticipant
technique categorized
make the final every
decision comment
about of thecategory
the aspect dataset. and
We applied the majority
the polarity voting As an
of a sentence.
Each to
technique participant categorized
make the final decision every comment
about the of the dataset.
aspect category and theWe applied
polarity of a the majority
sentence. voting
As an
example, we have taken the following comment:
technique to make the final decision about the aspect category and the polarity of a sentence. As an
example, we have taken the following comment:
এই following
example, we have taken“the িপেচ রান করা টাফ, বািলং িনঃসে েহ ভােলা হেয়েছ ”
comment:
The voting result we “এই
foundিপেচ
for রান
the করা টাফ,is is
comment
The voting result we found for the comment বািলং
given িনঃসে
in Table
given েহ
3. ভােলা
in Table 3. হেয়েছ ”
The voting result we found for the comment is given in Table 3.
Table 3. Voting example to define the category and polarity.
Table 3. Voting example to define the category and polarity.
Table 3. এই
Comment: Voting
িপেচ example to define
রান করা টাফ, বািলংthe category
িনঃসে andহেয়েছ
েহ ভােলা polarity.
Participant
Comment: এই Voting
িপেচ রানforকরা
Category
টাফ, বািলংVoting
িনঃসে forেহPolarity
ভােলা হেয়েছ
Comment:
P1 Bowling Positive
Participant Voting for Category Voting for Polarity
Participant
P2 Voting for Category
Bowling Voting for Polarity
Positive
P1 Bowling Positive
P3
P1P2 Batting
Bowling Negative Positive
Bowling Positive
P4
P2 Batting
Bowling Negative Positive
P3 Batting Negative
P5 Other Neutral
P3 Batting Negative
P6P4 Batting
Bowling Negative
Positive
P4P5 Batting
Other Negative
Neutral
P7 Other Neutral
P5 Other Neutral
P8P6 Bowling
Bowling Positive
Positive
P6 Bowling Positive
P9P7 Other
Bowling Neutral
Positive
P7 Other Neutral
P8
P10 Bowling
Batting Positive
Negative
P8 Bowling Positive
P9 Bowling Positive
P9 Bowling Positive
From Table 3, we can P10
see that the commentsBatting Negative
had three votes for Batting with a negative polarity,
P10 Batting Negative
two votes for Other with a neutral polarity, and four votes for Bowling with a positive polarity. Thus,
From Table
our method 3, we can
determined thissee that theascomments
comment had
being in the three votes
Bowling for Batting
category with a negative
with a positive polarity. polarity,
We
From
two Table
also votes 3,
forfor
had ties we
Other can
somewith see that
a neutral
comments. the comments
Inpolarity, had
and four
this situation, three
votesboth
we took votes for
for Bowling Batting with
with with
the categories their negative
a
a positive polarity.inpolarity,
polarity Thus,
two votes
our forTable
method
dataset. Other withthis
determined
4 shows aanneutral
comment
example polarity,
asthis
for being and four
in the
scenario. votes category
Bowling for Bowlingwith with a positive
a positive polarity.polarity.
We
Thus,
alsoour
hadmethod
ties for determined this comment
some comments. as beingwe
In this situation, intook
the Bowling category with
both the categories withatheir
positive polarity.
polarity in
Weour
alsodataset.
had tiesTable 4 shows
for some an example
comments. In for
thisthis scenario.
situation, we took both the categories with their polarity
in our dataset. Table 4 shows an example for this scenario.
Data 2018, 3, 15 5 of 10
Data 2018, 3, x 5 of 11

Table 4. Voting category identification.

Data 2018, 3, x Table 4. Voting category identification. 5 of 12

Comment: ওরা4.200
Table
Comment: কেরেছ,
Voting তামরাidentification.
category 100 করেত পারেব না?
Participant
Participant Voting
Comment: ওরা
forfor
Category
200 কেরেছ,
Voting Voting for Polarity
তামরা 100 করেতVoting
Category পারেব না?
for Polarity
P1
P1
Participant Batting
Voting Batting
for Category VotingNegative
for Negative
Polarity
P2P1
P2 Team
Team
Batting Negative
Negative
Negative
P3P2
P3 Batting
Batting
Team Negative
Negative
Negative
P4
P4P3 Batting
Batting
Batting Negative
Negative
Negative
P5 Batting Negative
P5P4 Batting
Batting Negative
Negative
P6 Team Negative
P6P5
P7
Batting
Team
Team
Negative
Negative
Negative
P7P6
P8 Team
Team
Batting Negative
Negative
Negative
P8P7
P9 Team
Team
Batting Negative
Negative
Negative
P10 P8 Batting
Team Negative
Negative
P9 Team Negative
P9 Team Negative
P10P10 Team
Team
Negative
Negative
We can see from Table 4 that 50% of the evaluators voted for Batting, and 50% of the votes were
We
for the can
We see
Team can from
category,
see fromTable
both 4 that
with
Table 50%
50%ofofthe
a negative
4 that evaluators
polarity.
the voted
As they
evaluators had
voted forfor Batting,
tied, ourand
Batting, and 50%
algorithm
50% of votes
took
of the the votes
both were
of these
were
for the
forTeam
categories category,
theinTeam
the labeled
category,both with
dataset
both a anegative
with
with anegative
negativepolarity.
polarity.
polarity. Asthey
As theyhadhadtied,
tied,
ourour algorithm
algorithm tooktook
bothboth
of of
theseWecategories
these
also in the
categories
faced labeled
in the
another dataset
labeled
kind dataset with
withaato
of problem negative
negative
constructpolarity.
polarity.
the dataset. After calculating the category,
we found We
We also also
facedfaced another
another
dissimilarities kind
forkind
some ofof problemto
problem
comments toamong
construct
constructthethe
thedataset.
dataset.
participants After calculating
After calculating
regarding thethepolarity
category,
the category,
of the
we
comment. found
we found For dissimilarities
dissimilarities
example, when for some
for some comments
comments
we considered among
theamong the participants
the comment,
following participants regarding
weregarding the
found the the polarity
voting of the
polarity
result of the
given
comment.
comment.
in Table 5. For For example,
example, when
when weweconsidered
considered thethe following
following comment,
comment, wewefound
foundthe the
voting resultresult
voting
given in Table 5.
given in Table 5.
Table 5. Problem related to polarity determination.
Table 5. Problem related to polarity determination.
Table 5. Problem related to polarity determination.
Comment: রা াক বুেড়া হেয় গেছ, খলা পােরনা। তাহেল আজ িকভােব িক করেলা?
Comment:
Comment: রা াক বুেড়া হেয়
Participant গেছ,
Voting খলা পােরনা। তাহেলVoting
for Category আজ িকভােব িক করেলা?
for Polarity
Participant Voting for Category Voting for Polarity
Participant
P1 Voting Bowling
for Category Voting for Polarity
Positive
P1 Bowling Positive
P1 P2 Bowling
Bowling Positive
Positive
P2 Bowling Positive
P2 P3 P3
Team
Bowling
Team
Negative
Positive
Negative
P3 P4 P4
Bowling
Team
Bowling
Negative
Negative
Negative
P5 Other Positive
P4 P5 Other
Bowling Positive
Negative
P6P6 Team
Team Negative
Negative
P5 Other Positive
P7P7 Other
Other Negative
Negative
P6 P8 P8
Team
Team
Team
Negative
Negative
Negative
P7 P9 P9 Other
Bowling
Bowling Negative
Positive
Positive
P8 P10
P10 TeamTeam
Team Negative
Negative
Negative
P9 Bowling Positive
From Table
P10 5, we can see that, for the comment, both the Bowling andNegative
Team categories had four
From Table 5, we can see that, for theTeamcomment, both the Bowling and Team categories had four
votes. Thus, we keep both of these categories in our annotated dataset. In polarity, there were three
votes. Thus, we keep both of these categories in our annotated dataset. In polarity, there were three
positive
From votes5,and
Table weone
cannegative
see that,vote for bowling. Thus, we the
considered it as having a positive polarity four
positive
andvotes
addedand
it toone
our negative votefor
dataset. Table
the
6for
comment,
bowling.
shows
both
Thus,
a sample
Bowling
welabeled
of the considered
Cricket
and
it as Team
havingcategories
dataset. a positivehad
polarity
votes.
and Thus,itwe
added to ourkeep both ofTable
dataset. these6 categories
shows a sample in ourofannotated dataset.
the labeled Cricket Indataset.
polarity, there were three
positive votes and one negative vote for bowling. Thus,
In Table 7, the summary of the complete Cricket dataset is presented. We we considered it as having a positive
can see polarity
that there are a
and added it to our dataset. Table 6 shows a sample of the labeled Cricket
total of 3034 different comments with five different categories, that is, Batting, Bowling, Team, Team dataset.
Management, and Other.Table Each 6. ofAthe categories
part contains
of the Cricket threein
dataset different polarities: positive, negative,
xlsx format.
and neutral. For example, the Batting category contains a total of 583 comments, for which 138 are of
positive, 389 are ofবয্াপার না। eটা and
negative, ধু মাt56ঘর্টare
না ছাড়া িকছু না। polarity. The Bowling category
of neutral other contains 154neutral
positive,
145 negative, and 33 neutral ভকামনা টাiগারেদরcomments.
polarity জনয্। The Team, Team Management, team and Other categories
positive
contain totals of বাংলােদশ eখেনাand
774, 332, তািমেমর
1013 েযাগয্ oেপনার েপেলাrespectively.
comments, না। batting negative
বাংলােদশ হারেব আজ । team negative
সাতজন িsনার িনেয় মােঠ েবাতল টানােনা যায় ময্াচ েজতা যায় না। bowling negative
টািনর্ং িপচ বািনেয় ঔষধ খু েজ লাভ িক বাuিn িপচ বানােলi হয়। team management negative
eটা পু রাদেম িফিkং eকটা েখলা হiেস। team negative
জয় ধু সমেয়র aেপkা। other positive
েযi জেয়র সমান!! other neutral
Data 2018, 3, 15 6 of 10
Data 2018, 3, x 6 of 12

6. A
Table 6.
Table A part
part of
of the
the Cricket
Cricket dataset
dataset in
in xlsx
xlsx format.
format.

বয্াপার না। eটা ধু মাt ঘর্টনা ছাড়া িকছু না। other neutral
ভকামনা টাiগারেদর জনয্। team positive
বাংলােদশ eখেনা তািমেমর েযাগয্ oেপনার েপেলা না। batting negative
বাংলােদশ হারেব আজ । team negative
সাতজন িsনার িনেয় মােঠ েবাতল টানােনা যায় ময্াচ েজতা যায় না। bowling negative
টািনর্ং িপচ বািনেয় ঔষধ খু েজ লাভ িক বাuিn িপচ বানােলi হয়। team management negative
eটা পু রাদেম িফিkং eকটা েখলা হiেস। team negative
জয় ধু সমেয়র aেপkা। other positive
েযi জেয়র সমান!! other neutral
েবালাররা েয পিরমােন শটর্ বল িদেc- তােত রান কতেবিশ হয় েসটাi েদখার িবষয়! bowling negative
তােক েটs আর oিডআi দেল িনয়িমত চাi। team positive
বাংলােদশ িkেকট আেরা eিগেয় যােব, oেপনারেদর eকটু ভােলা করেত হেব। team positive
বাংলােদশ িkেকট আেরা eিগেয় যােব, oেপনারেদর eকটু ভােলা করেত হেব। batting negative
িফেরi চমক েদখােলন রাjাক bowling positive
নবীনেদর সু েযাগ েদয়া দরকার. other neutral
েবািলং িপচ তেব আমােদর বয্াটসময্ানেদর আuট েলা আtহতয্া ছাড়া আর িকছু i নয়। batting negative
েবািলং িপচ তেব আমােদর বয্াটসময্ানেদর আuট েলা আtহতয্া ছাড়া আর িকছু i নয়। bowling neutral
দািয়tjান হীনতার aভাব? other negative

In Table 7, the summaryTableof7.the

Thecomplete
completeCricket dataset
statistics is presented.
of Cricket dataset. We can see that there are
a total of 3034 different comments with five different categories, that is, Batting, Bowling, Team, Team
Management, and Other. Each of the categories contains Polaritythree different polarities: positive, negative,
and neutral. ForCategory
example, the Batting category contains a total of 583 comments, for Total
which 138 are of
Positive Negative Neutral
positive, 389 are of negative, and 56 are of neutral polarity. The Bowling category contains 154
Batting
positive, 145 negative, and 33 neutral138 389
polarity comments. The Team,56Team Management,
583
and Other
Bowling 154 145 33 332
categories containTeam
totals of 774, 332, and
166 1013 comments,502 respectively.66 774
Team Management 24 293 15 332
Other Table 7. The
89 complete statistics
828 of Cricket dataset.
96 1013
Total Comments
Polarity 3034
Category Total
Positive Negative Neutral
2.1.2. Analysis of Proposed Cricket
Batting Dataset 138 389 56 583
Bowling 154 145 33 332
We used Zipf’s law [14] for our proposed Cricket dataset. Zipf’s law is a statement-based
Team 166 502 66 774
observation that states that
TeaminManagement
a collection of data,
24 the frequency
293 of15a given332
word should be inversely
proportional to its rank in the Other
corpus. The word 89that is the
828most frequent
96 and
1013scores rank 1 in a dataset
should occur approximately twice as the second
Total most frequent word, three
Comments 3034times as the third most
frequent, and so on. Figure 1 shows the diagram in which we plotted the words of our Cricket dataset.
2.1.2.follows
The plot Analysisthe
of trend
Proposed Cricketlaw.
of Zipf’s Dataset
We also calculated the reliability of the annotation process.
The valueWe of the intraclass correlation (ICC) was 0.71.
used Zipf’s law [14] for our proposed Cricket dataset. Zipf’s law is a statement-based
observation that states that in a collection of data, the frequency of a given word should be inversely
2.2. Restaurant Dataset
proportional to its rank in the corpus. The word that is the most frequent and scores rank 1 in a dataset
should
To occur
create theapproximately twice asdataset,
Bangla Restaurant the second
we most
tookfrequent word, three
help directly from times as the third
the English most
benchmark’s
frequent, and so on. Figure 1 shows the diagram in which we plotted the words of our Cricket dataset.
Restaurant dataset [3]. All comments were abstractly translated into Bangla with their exact annotation.
The plot follows the trend of Zipf’s law. We also calculated the reliability of the annotation process.
The original English dataset contains a total of 2800 different comments. Participants from the same
The value of the intraclass correlation (ICC) was 0.71.
group involved in the Cricket dataset’s creation were involved in the translation process of the
Restaurant dataset, except participants P9 and P10. We divided the original dataset equally into eight
parts and distributed these to the participants. They translated their assigned parts of the original
English dataset abstractly. Finally, participants P1 and P2 merged the separate sections and performed
an extensive proofread.
Data 2018, 3, 15 7 of 10

Figure
Figure 1. 1. Distributionof
Distribution of word
word fre que ncie s of
frequencies ofCricke t datase
Cricket t using
dataset usingZipf’s law.
Zipf’s law.

Annotation Schema for Restaurant

The Restaurant reviews [3] dataset used in this paper was abstractly translated into Bangla.
There were five types of aspect categories, that is, Food, Price, Service, Ambiance, and Miscellaneous.
As the objective was to identify the aspect category and corresponding polarity, the participants did
not add aspect terms or their polarities. In terms of the polarity of an aspect category, we considered
only three polarity labels, that is, positive, negative and neutral. The original dataset consisted of four
different polarity labels: positive, negative, neutral, and conflict. In our translated Bangla dataset,
we omitted the conflict category and assumed it to be the same as the neutral category. The annotators
were asked to assign each translated Bangla restaurant review into their categories and their polarities
for the original dataset. Table 8 shows a sample of the translated Restaurant dataset.
Data 2018, 3, x 8 of 12

Table8.8.AApart
Table partof
ofthe
theRestaurant datasetin
Restaurant dataset inxlsx
xlsxformat.
format.

খু ব সীিমত আসন আেছ eবং খাদয্ পাoয়ার জনয্ যেথ aেপkা করেত হেব। ambience negative
খু ব সীিমত আসন আেছ eবং খাদয্ পাoয়ার জনয্ যেথ aেপkা করেত হেব। service negative
Figure 2. Wordদাম freতুque
লনামূncy of Bangla
লকভােব কম। Re staurant datase t according to Zipf’s law.
price positive
াi িছল মজাদার food positive
3
যিদo খাবারিট চমৎকার িছল, eিট সsা িছল না। food positive
যিদo খাবারিট চমৎকার িছল, eিট সsা িছল না। price negative
খু ব ভাল! miscellaneous positive
আচােরর সংেযাজন খু ব ভাল িছল । food positive
ধু মাt রাnাi েয েসরা তা নয় , েসবা সবসময় মেনােযাগী eবং ভাল হেয়েছ। food positive
ধু মাt রাnাi েয েসরা তা নয় , েসবা সবসময় মেনােযাগী eবং ভাল হেয়েছ। service positive
সবর্দা eকিট সু nর িভড়, িকn েকান েকালাহল েনi। ambience positive
সjা alsl eবং পির ার - িব াn বা pশংসা করা িকছু i েনi ambience neutral
আিম িনি ত েয আমােক বারবর িফের েযেত হেব, !!! miscellaneous positive
সmাবত eিট eকিট েছাট আরামদায়ক েরsু েরn,ভাল সjার সে েরামািnক aনু ভূিত। ambience positive
যিদo খাদয্ ভাল িছল পিরেবষনা িছল িব । food positive
যিদo খাদয্ ভাল িছল পিরেবষনা িছল িব । service negative
Da ta 2018, 3, x; doi: কম রা মেনােযাগী eবং বnু tপূ ণ।র্ www.mdpi.c om/journal/data
service positive
খাবার ভাল িছল। food positive

Table 9 shows the complete statistics of the Bangla Restaurant dataset. We can see from the table
Table
that9five
shows the complete
different categories, statistics of the
that is, Food, Bangla
Price, Restaurant
Service, Ambiance,dataset. We can see
and Miscellaneous, from the table
contained
that five713,
different categories,
178, 336, thatreviews,
234, and 613 is, Food, Price, Service,
respectively, Ambiance,
with three and
different Miscellaneous,
polarities. contained
For example, the 713,
178, 336,category
234, andFood
613contained
reviews,500 positive, 126with
respectively, negative,
threeand 87 neutral
different sentiment
polarities. Forlabels. The Service
example, the category
category contained
Food contained 186 positive,
500 positive, 118 negative,
126 negative, andand87 32 neutralsentiment
neutral sentiments.labels.
We alsoThe found that this
Service category
Restaurant dataset also followed Zipf’s law, which is shown in Figure 2.

Table 9. Complete statistics of Bangla Restaurant dataset.

Polarity
Category Total
Positive Negative Neutral
Food 500 126 87 713
Data 2018, 3, 15 8 of 10

contained 186 positive, 118 negative, and 32 neutral sentiments. We also found that this Restaurant
dataset also followed Zipf’s law, which is shown in Figure 2.

Table 9. Complete statistics of Bangla Restaurant dataset.

Polarity
Category Total
Positive Negative Neutral
Food 500 126 87 713
Price 102 60 16 178
Service 186 118 32 336
Ambiance 138 53 43 234
Figure 1. Distribution of word fre que ncie s of Cricke t datase t using Zipf’s law.
Miscellaneous 300 120 193 613

Figure2.2.Word
Figure Wordfrequency
fre que ncyof
of Bangla
Bangla Re staurant datase
Restaurant datasett according
accordingtotoZipf’s
Zipf’slaw.
law.

3
3. Baseline Evaluation
Our objective is to provide benchmark datasets for Bangla ABSA. Our datasets are designed for
two major tasks of ABSA. These are aspect category extraction and the identification of polarity for
each aspect category. In this paper, we experimented with the first subtask, that is, the extraction of
the aspect category. We applied three major steps to extract the aspect category. Firstly, preprocessing
was performed on the dataset. After this, we extracted features from the data and finally performed
classification using some popular classification models.

3.1. Preprocessing and Feature Extraction

In the preprocessing phase, each Bangla document was represented as a “bag of words”.
We applied traditional preprocessing steps for the evaluation. Firstly, punctuations
Da ta 2018, 3, x; doi:
and stop words
www.mdpi.c om/journal/data
were removed from each of the comments. After this, we removed the digits from our dataset, because
we found that digits were not necessary for the aspect category. Finally, we tokenized each Bangla
word from our dataset.
Thus, a vocabulary of Bangla words was prepared after preprocessing. We created a feature
matrix for which each review was represented by a vector of that vocabulary. Term frequency–inverse
document frequency (TF–IDF) was used for calculating the features.

3.2. Results
In the training phase, extracted feature sets were trained by the popular supervised machine
learning algorithms. Because this was a multi-label classification problem, we trained our models
Data 2018, 3, 15 9 of 10

by setting up multi-label output. We used linear SVC in the support vector machine (SVM)
implementation. The following machine learning algorithms were used:

I. Support Vector Machine (SVM)

II. Random forest (RF)
III. K-nearest neighbor (KNN)

After the training was completed, our proposed Bangla test dataset was executed on the trained
model. The result is shown in the following table and figure.
Table 10 shows the results for the task of aspect category extraction of the datasets we have
presented in this paper. We can see that using the SVM, we obtained the highest precision rate for
both of the datasets. Both datasets showed a low recall and F1-score. Figure 3 shows the overall
accuracy of the models using our datasets. The inherent nature of the datasets is the reason behind the
lower performance of the models for both datasets. People share their opinion with their individual
judgment. Therefore, the variety of opinions in the datasets is much larger. On the other hand, aspect
extraction is a multi-label classification problem. One’s opinion might have multiple aspect categories.
Conventional classifiers miss some of these aspect categories.

Table 10. Performance of proposed datasets.

Dataset Model Precision Recall F1-Score

SVM 0.71 0.22 0.34
Cricket RF 0.60 0.27 0.37
KNN 0.45 0.21 0.25
SVM 0.77 0.30 0.38
Restaurant RF 0.64 0.26 0.33
KNN 0.54 0.34 0.42
Data 2018, 3, x 10 of 11

Accuracy
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
SVM RF KNN SVM RF KNN
Cricket Restaurant

Precision Recall F1-score

Figure 3. The result of three models of our datasets.

Figure 3. The result of three models of our datasets.
4. Conclusions and Future Work
Two datasets are provided for the ABSA of Bangla text. These datasets have been designed to
These results can be improved if we process and train the datasets in a more sophisticated
perform two tasks covering aspect category extraction and the identification of polarity for that aspect
way. In this work,
category. Wehave
we taken
also report all ofresults
baseline the vocabulary as features
to evaluate the task for theextraction.
of aspect category evaluation after removing
As future plans, we aim to enhance our work by including further
punctuation, stop words, and digits. Some state-of-the-art techniques for information domains such as cars, mobiles, gain can be
and laptops. We are working on more advanced methods for the ABSA of Bangla text using our
applied to the dataset before classification and after the preprocessing steps to attain better results.
datasets to achieve better performance.

4. Conclusions and
Author Future Work
Contributions: All authors contributed equally to this work, and have read and approved the final
manuscript.
Two datasets are provided for the ABSA of Bangla text. These datasets have been designed to
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
perform two tasks covering aspect category extraction and the identification of polarity for that aspect
category. WeReferences
also report baseline results to evaluate the task of aspect category extraction.
1. Trusov, M.; Bucklin, R.E.; Pauwels, K. Effects of word-of-mouth versus traditional marketing:
Findings from an internet social networking site. J. Mark. 2009, 73, 90–102.
2. Jeyapriya, A.; Selvi, C.K. Extracting Aspects and Mining Opinions in Product Reviews Using
Supervised Learning Algorithm. In Proceedings of the 2015 2nd International Conference on
Electronics and Communication Systems (ICECS), Coimbatore, India, 26–27 February 2015.
3. Pontiki, M.; Galanis, D.; Pavlopoulos, J.; Papageorgiou, H.; Androutsopoulos, I.; Manandhar, S.
SemEval-2014 Task 4: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis. Available Online:
Data 2018, 3, 15 10 of 10

As future plans, we aim to enhance our work by including further domains such as cars, mobiles,
and laptops. We are working on more advanced methods for the ABSA of Bangla text using our
datasets to achieve better performance.

Author Contributions: All authors contributed equally to this work, and have read and approved the
final manuscript.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

References
1. Trusov, M.; Bucklin, R.E.; Pauwels, K. Effects of word-of-mouth versus traditional marketing: Findings from
an internet social networking site. J. Mark. 2009, 73, 90–102. [CrossRef]
2. Jeyapriya, A.; Selvi, C.K. Extracting Aspects and Mining Opinions in Product Reviews Using Supervised
Learning Algorithm. In Proceedings of the 2015 2nd International Conference on Electronics and
Communication Systems (ICECS), Coimbatore, India, 26–27 February 2015.
3. Pontiki, M.; Galanis, D.; Pavlopoulos, J.; Papageorgiou, H.; Androutsopoulos, I.; Manandhar, S. SemEval-2014
Task 4: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis. Available online: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S14-2004
(accessed on 3 May 2018).
4. Al-Smadi, M.; Qawasmeh, O.; Talafha, B.; Quwaider, M. Human Annotated Arabic Dataset of Book Reviews
for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2015 3rd International Conference on Future
Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud), Rome, Italy, 24–26 August 2015.
5. Tamchyna, A.; Fiala, O.; Veselovská, K. Czech Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: A New Dataset and Preliminary
Results. Available online: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cbd8/7f4201c427db33783b1890bca65f5bf99d2c.pdf
(accessed on 3 May 2018).
6. Apidianaki, M.; Tannier, X.; Richart, C. Datasets for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis in French. Available
online: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2016/pdf/61_Paper.pdf (accessed on 3 May 2018).
7. Gayatree, G.; Elhadad, N.; Marian, A. Beyond the Stars: Improving Rating Predictions Using Review Text
Content. Available online: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.150.140&rep=rep1&
type=pdf (accessed on 3 May 2018).
8. Kiritchenko, S.; Zhu, X.; Cherry, C.; Mohammad, S. NRC-Canada-2014: Detecting Aspects and Sentiment
in Customer Reviews. Available online: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S14-2076 (accessed on
3 May 2018).
9. Kiritchenko, S.; Zhu, X.; Cherry, C.; Mohammad, S. Supervised and Unsupervised Aspect Category Detection
for Sentiment Analysis with Co-cccurrence Data. In IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics; IEEE: Piscataway, NJ,
USA, 2017.
10. Soujanya, P.; Cambria, E.; Gelbukh, A. Aspect extraction for opinion mining with a deep convolutional
neural network. Knowl.-Based Syst. 2016, 108, 42–49.
11. Pengfei, L.; Joty, S.; Meng, H. Fine-Grained Opinion Mining with Recurrent Neural Networks and Word
Embeddings. Available online: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D15-1168 (accessed on 3 May 2018).
12. Pontiki, M.; Galanis, D.; Papageorgiou, H.; Manandhar, S.; Androutsopoulos, I. Semeval-2015 Task 12: Aspect
Based Sentiment Analysis. Available online: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S15-2082 (accessed on
3 May 2018).
13. Pontiki, M.; Galanis, D.; Papageorgiou, H.; Androutsopoulos, I.; Manandhar, S.; AL-Smadi, M.;
Al-Ayyoub, M.; Zhao, Y.; Qin, B.; De Clercq, O.; et al. SemEval-2016 Task 5: Aspect Based Sentiment
Analysis. Available online: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/S16-1002 (accessed on 3 May 2018).
14. Pak, A.; Paroubek, P. Twitter as A Corpus for Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining. Available online:
http://crowdsourcing-class.org/assignments/downloads/pak-paroubek.pdf (accessed on 3 May 2018).

© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access
article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution
(CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).