SemEval 2014 Task 4: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis
Annotation Guidelines
1. Introduction
The purpose of this annotation is to detect aspects and their sentiment polarity within
sentences. Sentences from customer reviews of restaurants and laptops will be used in this
task, i.e., the target entities will be particular restaurants or laptops. For a given target entity -
a restaurant or laptop-, the task of the annotator is to identify the following types of
information:
Aspect terms
Single or multiword terms naming particular aspects of the target entity. For example,
in “I liked the service and the staff, but not the food”, the aspect terms are “service”,
“staff” and “food”; in “The hard disk is very noisy” the only aspect term is “hard
disk”.
Aspect term polarity
Each aspect term has to be assigned one of the following polarities based on the
sentiment that is expressed in the sentence about it:
o positive
o negative
o conflict (both positive and negative sentiment)
o neutral (neither positive nor negative sentiment)
For example, in “I hated their fajitas, but their salads were great”, the aspect term
“fajitas” has negative polarity and “salads” has positive polarity; in “The fajitas were
their starters”, “fajitas” has neutral polarity; and in “The fajitas were great to taste,
but not to see”, “fajitas” has conflict polarity.
For the restaurant data, two further types of information need to be annotated:
Aspect category
The task of the annotator is to identify the aspect categories discussed in a sentence
given the following five aspect categories:
o food
o service
o price
o ambience (sentences referring to the atmosphere and the environment of a
restaurant)
o anecdotes/miscellaneous (sentences that do not belong to the above four
categories)
A sentence may be classified into one or more aspect categories based on its overall
meaning. For example, the sentence “The restaurant was expensive, but the menu was
great” discusses the aspect categories price and food.
Aspect category polarity
Each aspect category discussed by a particular sentence has to be assigned one of the
following polarities based on the sentiment that is expressed in the sentence about it:
o positive
o negative
