Combining large language models with interpretable models for explainable aspect-based sentiment analysis in the medical domain

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) effectively enables fine-grained understanding of medical feedback texts, but existing methods typically lack transparency, limiting trustworthiness in practical medical scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage ABSA framework for healthcare, integrating large language models with interpretable classifiers. In the first stage, structured aspect-sentiment pairs are extracted from patient feedback using a large language model guided by chained prompts. The second stage employs a lightweight interpretable classifier to perform final sentiment predictions on these structured representations, generating explicit decision justifications through post-hoc explanation methods such as SHAP and LIME. Experiments conducted on publicly available medical datasets, including the PatientInfo patient feedback dataset, HCAHPS patient surveys, and WebMD drug reviews, demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms several mainstream baseline methods. Ablation analyses further confirm the effectiveness of the prompt chaining strategy and interpretable classification. The proposed framework ensures high predictive accuracy while substantially enhancing transparency and interpretability, making it highly suitable for medical feedback analysis tasks that require model reliability and trustworthiness.