Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Turkish Reviews Using Token and Sequential Classification Methods

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to identify sentiments expressed toward specific aspects or attributes of entities in text. This study addresses the under-explored area of ABSA in the Turkish language by extracting aspect terms (targets) and their categories from customer reviews and determining the sentiment polarity for each aspect. Turkish, being a morphologically rich and structurally complex language, poses unique challenges that often hinder the direct application of methods developed for other languages. Hence, developing sentiment analysis approaches tailored to Turkish is of significant importance. We propose a two-stage pipeline: a token-level classification to recognize aspect terms and assign them to one of 12 predefined aspect categories, followed by a sequence-level (sentence-level) classification to predict sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) for each identified aspect. We fine-tuned five transformer-based language models (BERT, ConvBERT, ELECTRA, DeBERTa, and DistilBERT) for aspect term and category extraction, and four models (BERT, ConvBERT, ELECTRA, DistilBERT) for sentiment classification. Experimental results on the SemEval-2016 Turkish ABSA Restaurant dataset show that the BERT model achieved the highest accuracy (92.20%) for aspect term and category identification, closely followed by ConvBERT (91.68%). For sentiment analysis, ConvBERT performed best with an accuracy of 86.91%, outperforming ELECTRA (85.34%), BERT (82.75%), and DistilBERT (77.48%). These findings demonstrate that pre-trained transformer models can effectively handle fine-grained sentiment analysis in Turkish, substantially improving on previous approaches. The proposed pipeline and comparative results provide a novel benchmark for Turkish ABSA, with potential applications in analyzing Turkish customer feedback to glean actionable insights.