Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-023-01166-w

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Knowledge‑enhanced graph convolutional networks for Arabic aspect

sentiment classification
Rajae Bensoltane1 · Taher Zaki1

Received: 20 July 2022 / Revised: 2 November 2023 / Accepted: 6 November 2023

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2023

Abstract
Aspect sentiment classification (ASC) is a sub-task of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) that aims at identifying the
sentiment polarity toward a specific aspect in a given text or sentence. Most existing research on Arabic ABSA adopted
rule-based or machine learning-based methods, with little attention to deep learning techniques. Additionally, the major-
ity of these deep learning-based models relied on attention mechanisms to capture the interaction between the context and
aspect words. However, attention-based methods are generally inefficient in extracting the syntactic dependencies between
contextual tokens and aspects. Therefore, we introduce a combined model that incorporates an Arabic BERT model with
graph convolutional network and local context focus layers to capture syntactic dependencies relevant to a specific aspect
while emphasizing the contribution of semantic-related tokens related to this aspect. We also integrate affective common-
sense knowledge into the graph networks to capture the sentiment-related dependencies between contextual words and the
specific aspect. The experimental results on an Arabic hotel dataset show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline
and related work models and achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy score of 92.77% in Arabic ASC. The achieved results show
the effectiveness of the proposed model in enhancing the aspect-specific sentiment representations, which can be promising
for future research in this field.

Keywords Aspect sentiment classification · BERT · Graph convolutional networks · Affective commonsense knowledge ·
Local context focus · Arabic

1 Introduction or a sentence, which is insufficient when different opinions

In today’s digital age, the daily exchange of vast amounts of
data via a multitude of websites and social media platforms
has ignited significant interest in various research areas, with
sentiment analysis standing out as a notable example. As a
subfield of natural language processing, sentiment analysis
allows the automated extraction of opinions, thoughts, and
attitudes from a given text, finding widespread applications
across numerous domains, such as social networks (Li et al.
2023; Rodríguez-Ibánez et al. 2023) and business (Costola
et al. 2023; Huang et al. 2023a, b).
Sentiment analysis can be performed on three levels:
document level, sentence level, and aspect level. The first
two levels identify the sentiment of the whole document
* Rajae Bensoltane
r.bensoltane@uiz.ac.ma
1
Laboratory of Innovation in Mathematics and Intelligent
Systems, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Agadir, Morocco
are expressed toward multiple aspects or entities in the
same text. Therefore, the aspect level, also referred to as
aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), has become an
active research task of sentiment analysis, as it enables the
extraction of aspect terms and the corresponding sentiment
polarities.
ABSA can be divided into two main sub-tasks: aspect
term extraction (ATE) and aspect sentiment classifica-
tion (ASC). The purpose of the ATE task is to extract the
discussed aspect terms, while the ASC task aims at iden-
tifying the sentiment polarity toward each aspect. Given
this sentence: “the pasta was delicious, but the waiter was
unfriendly,” the discussed aspects are pasta and waiter, and
the corresponding sentiments are positive and negative,
respectively. The ASC task allows us to gain deep insights
into users’ preferences for different aspects of a given entity
in various domains, such as education (Kastrati et al. 2020),
healthcare (Zhao et al. 2023), box office predictors (Yang
et al. 2023), and brand monitoring (Xu et al. 2022).

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Arabic is one of the most spoken languages in the world,
with more than 422 million speakers (Omar and Abd El-
Hafeez 2023). According to the Internet World Stats, it is
ranked as the fourth most used language on the internet.
The Arabic online content is growing rapidly (Alqurashi
2023), enabling Arabic sentiment analysis (ASA) to get lots
of attention from researchers in recent years. However, most
existing ASA work has focused on the document and sen-
tence levels, with little attention to the ABSA tasks (Ben-
soltane and Zaki 2023a).
Moreover, most existing Arabic ABSA papers have
adopted rule-based or traditional machine learning classifi-
ers to handle these tasks with limited work on deep learning
models (Bensoltane and Zaki 2023b). Besides, most of the
proposed Arabic ABSA deep learning-based methods used
traditional word embedding models for word vector repre-
sentations, which provide static embedding vectors for each
word independently of the context in which it occurs. Fur-
thermore, most of these deep learning-based methods were
implemented based on attention mechanisms, which are
inefficient in extracting syntactical dependencies between
contextual tokens and aspect words (Huang et al. 2023a, b).
Therefore, the aim of this paper is to overcome the afore-
mentioned shortcomings by proposing a combined model
that incorporates an Arabic BERT model, called AraBERT
(Antoun et al. 2020), along with graph convolutional net-
work (GCN) and local context focus (LCF) layers to cap-
ture the syntactically related words to the specific aspect
based on the syntactic dependency tree of the sentence
while focusing on local context features that are relevant
to the given aspect term. Moreover, we explore the use of
an affective commonsense knowledge base to enhance the
dependency graphs of the sentence. The main contributions
of this study are:
• We introduce a combined model that incorporates the
strengths of the AraBERT model with GCN and LCF
layers to further enhance the task of ASC on Arabic data-
set. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use this
combination to handle this task in Arabic.
• We exploit the syntax-related context information using
GCN over the dependency tree of the sentence to enhance
this task, which is, to our knowledge, the first time to use
GCN for the Arabic ASC task.
• We investigate the use of an affective commonsense
knowledge to capture the contextual affective dependen-
cies related to the specific aspect. As far as we know,
this is the first time to examine the use of an affective
knowledge base for this task in Arabic.
• Extensive experiments on an Arabic reference dataset
show that the proposed model outperforms the baseline
and related work models and achieves a state-of-the-art
accuracy score.
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Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6
The reminder of the paper is structured as follows: Sect. 2
overviews related work to Arabic ASC, GCN, and Sentic-
Net; Sect. 3 describes the proposed model in detail; Sect. 4
presents the experimental setup; Sect. 5 discusses the eval-
uation results; finally, the conclusion and future research
directions are provided in Sect. 6.
2 Related work
This section is divided into three main subsections. The first
subsection overviews related work to Arabic ASC using
deep learning models. The second subsection introduces
graph-based studies for ASC. Since the lack of Arabic ASC
methods using GCN, papers that targeted the English lan-
guage are overviewed. Finally, the third subsection discusses
studies that have used SenticNet knowledge base, primarily
for handling the ASC task.
2.1 Arabic aspect sentiment classification
Most existing ASA work focused mainly on the document or
sentence levels with limited studies on ABSA. Furthermore,
deep learning models are under-discovered in this task for
the Arabic language (Bensoltane and Zaki 2023a).
One of the earlier studies adopting a deep learning
method for Arabic ASC is Ruder et al. (2016). The sys-
tem was submitted to the SemEval workshop (Pontiki et al.
2016) and was ranked 1st in Arabic. The model fed both
the aspect embedding and the input sequence embeddings
into a convolutional neural network (CNN) model for sen-
timent polarity identification. Different variants of adding
the aspect vector to the model were examined, and the best
results were achieved by concatenating each aspect vector
with the word vector before the convolution. The proposed
model achieved an overall enhancement of 11.8% over the
baseline model. Nevertheless, one main limitation of this
model is the use of random word embeddings to represent
input text, which negatively affects its ability in encoding
context and semantic features.
The authors in Al-Smadi et al. (2019) implemented their
model based on bidirectional long short-term memory (BiL-
STM) to enhance the ASC task on the same Arabic hotel
dataset from SemEval 2016 task 5. They followed the work
of (Wang et al. 2016) by encoding the opinions targets as
features to force the attention layer to focus on the impor-
tant parts of the sentence. Experiments showed that the pro-
posed method obtained similar results to the previous model
(accuracy = 82.6% vs. 82.7%). Although the proposed model
utilizes an attention mechanism to capture the importance of
context words to a specific aspect term, the context vectors
must encode both the aspect and sentiment information and
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6
the alignment scores are uniformly applied across all feature
dimensions, irrespective of their differences.
An attempt to enhance the previous results was proposed
in Abdelgwad et al. (2021). The authors followed the work
of Ma et al. (2017) to implement an interactive attention
network (called IAN-BGRU) but using bidirectional gated
recurrent units (BiGRU) instead of BiLSTM. Two BiGRU
layers were first applied to extract both aspect and context
representations, followed by two attention mechanisms to
compute attention vectors. The proposed model achieved an
overall improvement over the model of Ruder et al. (2016).
However, the main limitation of this model is the use of a
coarse-grained attention mechanism since they rely on aver-
age vectors to determine attention weights for contexts, and
as a result, they cannot capture word-level interactions.
Al-Dabet et al. (2021) have also sought to enhance the
previous results by exploiting the success of memory net-
works and attention mechanisms. They first implemented a
memory module using a stacked bidirectional independent
long short-term memory network (IndyLSTM) with three
layers, followed by a recurrent attention module to help
the model focus on the sentence’s key parts. The proposed
model achieved more than 3% improvement compared to
the IAN-BGRU model. Although this model achieved bet-
ter results than other attention-based models thanks to the
combination of multiple attentions with IndyLSTM layers,
it primarily focuses on the semantic information of the sen-
tence and ignores the syntactic structure knowledge, which
may increase the noise introduced by attention mechanisms.
Unlike the previous models that exploited context-inde-
pendent word embeddings to initialize the neural network
models, the authors in Abdelgwad et al. (2022) investigated
using contextualized word embeddings from the BERT
model to enhance the Arabic ASC task. They used BERT’s
sentence pair input architecture to handle this task by accept-
ing the sentence as the first input and the aspect as the sec-
ond input. The BERT-based model was then fine-tuned on
the downstream task with a linear classification layer for the
sentiment polarity prediction. The proposed model achieved
enhanced results compared with previous models on the
Arabic hotel reviews (accuracy = 89.51%). Despite BERT’s
effectiveness in capturing contextual and semantic features
from text, it does not possess explicit capabilities for mod-
eling sentence syntactic structures and dependencies.
Al-Smadi et al. (2023) has exploited a multilingual uni-
versal sentence encoder (MUSE) with a gated recurrent unit
model to improve the previous results for the Arabic ASC
task. Instead of word or character-level embeddings, the
MUSE model provides sentence-level embeddings. Besides,
The BiGRU layers were concatenated using global max
pooling and global average pooling to reduce the dimensions
of the previous layers while maintaining the important fea-
tures. The proposed model achieved an overall enhancement
Page 3 of 14 6
of 15% over the baseline model. Nevertheless, it is unable to
capture syntax information and long-range word dependen-
cies, which are crucial for the ASC task.
A recent study of Fadel et al. (2023) adapted the LCF-
ATEPC model (Yang et al. 2021) to handle extract aspect
terms and identify their sentiment polarities at the same
time. The authors employed an Arabic BERT model as a
shared layer for Arabic contextual text representation. They
then used multi-head self-attention and LCF mechanism to
model the interactive information between the context and
a specific aspect word. The proposed model achieved an
accuracy score of 91.5% in ASC and an F1 score of 75.94%.
This method considers the word counts between two words
as their semantic-relative distance, disregarding the mutual
syntactic associations. Nonetheless, crucial sentiment words
may be linked to the target aspect terms through grammatical
rules, even if they have a considerable semantic separation.
2.2 Graph convolutional network
GCN has recently been successively applied in many NLP
tasks, such as named entity recognition (Madan et al.
2023), text classification (Zhao et al. 2022a, b), and ques-
tion answering (Yusuf et al. 2022). In addition, GCN-based
models have enabled the detection of syntactically relevant
words to the given aspect by capturing long-term syntactic
dependencies through convolutional operation, which has
shown promising results in ASC. One of the first papers
investigating the use of GCN for the ASC task is Zhang
et al. (2019). The authors implemented a GCN layer over
the dependency tree of the sentence to capture syntactical
information and long-range multi-word dependencies. The
authors in Zhao et al. (2020) used a GCN-based model to
learn the sentiment dependencies between multiple aspects
in one sentence. Zhang and Qian (2020) first used a global
lexical graph for encoding word co-occurrence informa-
tion at the corpus level. They then build a concept hier-
archy on each of the syntactic and lexical graphs for dif-
ferentiating various types of dependency relations or word
co-occurrence relations. Zhao et al. (2022a, b) introduced
a GCN model with multiple weight mechanisms, called
MWM-GCN. Unlike conventional methods, MWM-GCN
utilizes a dynamic weight alignment mechanism to ensure
BERT’s WordPiece unit aligns with word-level dependen-
cies, improving its performance. An aspect-aware weight
mechanism regulates the flow of information to the aspect
during graph convolution. Additionally, it incorporates an
aspect-oriented dynamic loading layer and multi-head self-
attention to enhance the model’s ability to capture syntax
and semantics for classification. A recent work of Huang
et al. (2023a, b) employed a conditional random field (CRF)
chain to identify the opinion span of a word specific to a
particular aspect. It then incorporates the context within this
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opinion span into a multilayer graph convolutional network
by utilizing an enhanced position decay function. Finally, it
computes vector expressions of global nodes to predict senti-
ment polarity labels that are specific to the aspect.
2.3 SenticNet knowledge base
SenticNet is one of the most used affective knowledge bases,
which is a publicly available lexical resource that provides
several thousand commonsense concepts along with their
sentiment scores (Bisio et al. 2017). Different versions have
been released for SenticNet, primarily focused on Eng-
lish, such as SenticNet 2 (Cambria et al. 2012), SenticNet
3 (Cambria et al. 2014), and SenticNet 4 (Cambria et al.
2016). In addition, a multilingual version, called BabelSen-
ticNet, has been provided to handle 40 languages (i.e., Ara-
bic), which we use in this study. SenticNet has been utilized
in many tasks such as sarcasm detection (Du et al. 2022),
emotion recognition (Chen et al. 2023), and text classifica-
tion (Wu 2023). Recently, many studies have used the affec-
tive knowledge from SenticNet to enhance the sentiment
features representation for handling the ASC task. Zhou
et al. (2020) implemented two strategies to model the syn-
tactic dependency tree and commonsense knowledge graph
to enrich the representation of a sentence toward a specific
aspect. In the first strategy, two GCN models were employed
to independently encode the syntactic graph and the knowl-
edge graph. In the second strategy, a combined syntactic and
knowledge GCN model was constructed to represent both
the syntactic and knowledge graphs jointly. The authors in
Liang et al. (2022) proposed a novel solution for construct-
ing the graph by enhancing the dependency graph of the
sentence using affective knowledge from SenticNet. The
novel affective-enhanced graph model takes into account
both the relationships among contextual words and aspect
words, as well as the affective information between opinion
words and the aspect. Liu et al. (2023) introduced a dual-
gated graph convolutional network (DGGCN) model that
integrates GCN into the gating mechanism to amplify the
interaction between the context and the aspect word while
consolidating the affective attributes linked to the specified
aspect. Moreover, including contextual affective knowledge
in the graph networks helps DGGCN better understand sen-
timent-related data. Gu et al. (2023) proposed a GCN model
(called EK-GCN) that incorporates external knowledge like
SenticNet and part-of-speech information. It employed a
Part-of-Speech Matrix to capture the influence of words
like negations and modifiers, a Sentiment Lexicon to assign
sentiment scores to words, and a Word–Sentence Interaction
Network (WSIN) to filter relevant sentence information. The
proposed model can effectively overcome the challenge of
capturing edge labels and enhance the significance of words
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Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6
that impact sentiment polarity, including negations, modi-
fiers, and other related terms.
Despite the success of the previous GCN-based models in
handling the ASC task, this method is under-discovered in
Arabic ABSA. Therefore, the aim of this study is to enhance
the Arabic ASC task by exploiting the syntactic information
using GCN over the dependency tree of the sentence. We
also investigate the enhancement of the graph dependencies
using affective knowledge from BabelSenticNet. Moreover,
our proposed model integrates an LCF layer to reduce the
influence of irrelevant words to a specific aspect.
3 Research methodology
3.1 Problem definition
The aim of the ASC task is to determine the sentiment
polarity of a specific aspect word in a given text by captur-
ing aspect-related sentiment information from the context,
which can be formulated as follows:
Given a sentence S = [W1, W2,…, Wn] of n words and
an aspect term x = [x1, x2,…, xt], which contains t words
(1 ≤ t ≤ n). The aim of this task is to predict the sentiment
polarity (positive, negative, or neutral) regarding the aspect
term x for S.
3.2 Model overview
As illustrated in Fig. 1, our combined model is composed of
different components: two independent AraBERT layers for
local and global contextual features encoding, an LCF layer
to focus on local contextual words, an enhanced GCN based
on BabelSenticNet to exploit the affective dependencies
between contextual words and specific aspects, an interac-
tive learning layer to learn the profound correlation between
context and targeted aspects, and finally an output layer to
predict the sentiment polarity toward the aspect word.
3.2.1 AraBERT layers
Pre-trained language models (PTMs) have achieved state-
of-the-art in many NLP tasks, including ABSA (Abas et al.
2020; Zhao and Yu 2021). Many PTMs models were pro-
vided in the last few years, such as BERT (Devlin et al.
2019) and XLNET (Yang et al. 2019). BERT is a deeply
bidirectional model based on transformers. Unlike tradi-
tional word embedding models such GloVe (Pennington
et al. 2014) and Word2Vec (Mikolov et al. 2013), BERT
can provide different vector representations to the same word
based on the context in which it appears.
In this paper, two independent AraBERT layers are
employed to provide two types of contextual features. One
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6 Page 5 of 14 6

Fig. 1  The overall architecture

of the proposed model

{
layer generates global context features by accepting a sen- Z, SRDi ≤ 𝛼
tence pair as input (Xg = [CLS]sentence [SEP]aspect term Ki =
O, SRDi > 𝛼 (4)
[SEP]) to help detect the semantic relationship between the
contextual sentence and the aspect. The other layer provides [ ]
local context features by taking the context sentence as input M = K1m , K2m , K3m , … Knm (5)
(Xl = [CLS]sentence [SEP]). The outputs of the AraBERT
layers are annotated as follows: BlCDM = Bl ⋅ M (6)
( )
Bg = AraBERTglobal Xg (1) M is a feature masking matrix and Ki denotes the mask
vectors for each token. m is the input sequence length,
( ) whereas α is the SRD threshold. O and Z are the zeros and
Bl = AraBERTlocal Xl (2)
the ones vectors, respectively. “·” denotes the vector dot
product operation.
3.2.2 LCF layer Unlike CDM that totally ignores the features of non-local
context, CDW keeps less-semantic-relative context features
Following the work of Zeng et al. (2019), we integrated but de-emphasizes them according to their SRD to the aspect
an LCF layer to help the model focus on the sentimental term:
information contained in the neighbor words to the aspect {
term. This layer uses the semantic-relative distance (SRD) Z SRDi ≤ 𝛼
Ki = SRDi −𝛼 (7)
to detect the local context of the targeted aspect. SRD is n
⋅ Z SRDi > 𝛼
measured by counting words between context tokens and
aspect terms as follows: [ ]
Q = K1w , K2w , K3w , … Knw (8)
⌊ ⌋
l
SRDi = ||i − Pa || − (3)
2
BlCDW = Bl ⋅ Q (9)
where i represents the location of the context word, Pa is
the average position of the aspect term, and l represents the where Q is the weight matrix and Ki denotes the weight vec-
length of the aspect. S­ RDi denotes the SRD between a spe- tor for each less-semantic-relative contextual word.
cific aspect and the i-th context word.
Two architectures are evaluated in this paper to focus 3.2.3 Knowledge‑enhanced GCN layers
on local contexts, namely, context-features dynamic mask
(CDM) and context-features dynamic weighting (CDW). For the ASC task, it is crucial to capture syntactical infor-
CDM masks out less-semantic context features learned mation and mine word dependencies between words from a
by the AraBERT layer for which the SRD to aspect words given text. Therefore, we applied a multilayer GCN over the
is greater than a pre-defined threshold. The local context syntactic dependency tree of the sentence. First, the graph
output is calculated as follows: of convolutional networks over the dependency tree of each

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 6 Page 6 of 14 Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6

layer. F is a position-aware transformation function (Zhang

et al. 2019). Ẽi is a symmetric normalized adjacency matrix:

Ẽi = Ei ∕(Ui + 1) (16)

Fig. 2  Example of a dependency tree of an Arabic sentence n

∑
Ui = Eij (17)
i=1

Table 1  Example of affective Word Score Ui is the degree of the i-th token in the tree.
words and their corresponding
scores from BabelSenticNet ‫( سيء‬Bad) − 0.605
3.2.4 Interactive learning layer
‫( رائع‬Amazing) 0.793
‫( صعب‬Difficult) − 0.539
In this layer, a multi-head self-attention (MHSA) is applied
‫( جميل‬Beautiful) 0.721
on the concatenation (Bconc) of local context, global context,
‫( مقزز‬Disgusting) − 0.439
and the final output of GCN layers to improve the model’s
ability to learn the profound correlation between context and
aspect words:
sentence is constructed. Figure 2 illustrates an example of
a dependency tree. Then, the adjacency matrix of the graph Bconc
FCL
= W conc ⋅ Bconc + bconc (18)
is derived as follows:
{ ( )
1, if wi , wj contains dependency BILconc = MHSA Bconc
FCL (19)
Ai,j = (10)
0, 0 otherwise
Wconc and bconc are the weight and bias vectors of the fully
connected layer (FCL), respectively.
Inspired by the work of Liang et al. (2022), the represen-
tation of the adjacency matrix is enhanced by incorporating 3.2.5 Output layer
the affective information between context tokens and aspect
words using BabelSenticNet as follows: The sentiment polarity is predicted by pooling out the output
( ) of the interactive layer and feed it into a SoftMax layer:
Ei,j = Ai,j × Si,j + Ri,j + 1 (11) ( )
Bconc
pool
= POOL BILconc (20)
( ) ( )
Si,j = BabelSenticNet wi + BabelSenticNet wj (12) � �
exp Bconc
pool
{
1, if wi or wj is an aspect term Y=∑ � � (21)
Ri,j = (13) C
exp Bconc
0, 0 otherwise j=1 pool

where BabelSenticNet (wi) and BabelSenticNet (wj) are where C denotes the number of sentiment classes and Y is
the affective scores from BabelSenticNet database of the the predicted value of aspect sentiment polarity.
words wi and wj, respectively. Examples of affective scores
of some Arabic words are illustrated in Table 1.
The graph is then fed into the GCN layers to learn the 4 Experimental setup
affective dependencies related to a given aspect. Each node
in the l-th GCN layer is updated based on its neighboring 4.1 Dataset
nodes:
( ) The experiments were conducted on an Arabic dataset
vli = relu Ẽi gl−1
i
wl
+ b l
(14) from the hotel domain (Al-Smadi et al. 2016; Pontiki et al.
2016). The data was selected from hotel reviews collected
( ) by ElSahar and El-Beltagy (2015). The annotation scheme
gl−1
i
= F vl−1
i (15) followed the SemEval 2016 task 5 guidelines. Figure 3
illustrates an example of an annotated review from the
where vli denotes the product of current GCN layer. gl−1 is
i used dataset. Each review consists of one or multiple
the representation of i-th token evolved from the previous
sentences, and each sentence consists of a list of tuples

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Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6 Page 7 of 14 6

Fig. 3  Example of an annotated

review from the Arabic hotel
dataset

Table 2  Distribution size of the Arabic hotel dataset in terms of train- Table 4  Experimental hyper-parameters
ing and testing sets
Hyper-parameter Value
Reviews Sentences Tuples
Batch size 16
Training set 1839 4802 10,509 Max sequence length 128
Testing set 452 1227 2604 Dropout 0.2
Optimizer Adam
L2 regularization 1e−5
Table 3  Number of aspects per sentiment class in the training and Learning rate for BERT-based models 2e−5
testing sets Learning rate for non-BERT models 1e−3
Positive Negative Neutral Loss function Cross-entropy

Training set 6197 3629 683

Testing set 1508 927 169
4.3 Evaluation metrics

The accuracy score is the primary used metric in previ-

containing three elements: category, target, and polarity. ous Arabic ASC papers. We also adopt the macro aver-
The distribution size of the dataset is shown in Table 2, age of F1 score, as it is more suitable when the dataset is
whereas Table 3 illustrates the distribution of aspects per unbalanced.
sentiment class.
T
Accuracy = (22)
N
4.2 Experimental settings where T is the number of correctly predicted samples and N
is the total number of samples.
The models were implemented using PyTorch and Python
3.6 and trained on NVIDEA Tesla K80. For non-BERT 2 × MP × MR
Macro F1 = (23)
models, we used a Twitter-based 300-dimensional Ara- MP + MR
Vec model (Soliman et al. 2017) to initialize word vectors.
The BERT-based models were implemented using the base
C
1∑
architecture of the second version of the AraBERT model, MP = MPj (24)
C j
named AraBERTv02, with a hidden size of 768 and 12 lay-
ers of transformers with a number of self-attention heads
C
of 12. Besides, the dependency graph was constructed with 1∑
MR = MRj (25)
un-directional. For the knowledge base, the BabelSenticNet C j
database was utilized to handle the Arabic language. Table 4
illustrates the adopted hyper-parameters in this study, which where C denotes the number of sentiment classes. M ­ Pj and
were selected using a grid search technique. ­MRj are the precision and recall for class j, respectively.

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Table 5  Main experimental Type of representation Model Accuracy (%) Macro F1

results score (%)

– Baseline (Pontiki et al. 2016) 76.4† –

AraVec-based AB-LSTM-PC (Al-Smadi et al. 2019) 82.60† –
IAN-GRU (M.Abdelgwad et al. 2021) 83.98† –
MBRA (Al-Dabet et al. 2021) 87.31† –
AOA 85.74* 66.51*
ASGCN-DG 87.53* 67.27*
SenticGCN 88.52* 68.23*
AraBERT-based BERT-Linear-pair (Abdelgwad et al. 2022) 89.51† –
LCF-BERT 90.97* 79.83*
ASGCN-BERT 90.03 72.23
SenticGCN-BERT 90.84* 79.4*
ArBLCSNGCN (CDW) (ours) 91.85 78.45
ArBLCSNGCN (CDM) (ours) 92.77 81.59

The results with “†” are retrieved from the original papers. The results with “*” are obtained by imple-
menting the models based on the published source codes using the same Arabic dataset. The best results
are marked in bold and the unreported values are represented with “–”

4.4 Baseline and related work
In order to comprehensively evaluate the performance of
our model, we compare it with the following baseline and
related work models:
Baseline (Pontiki et al. 2016): Is an SVM-based classifier
provided by the SemEval competition. N-gram features were
used to train an SVM classifier with a linear kernel.
AB-LSTM-PC (Al-Smadi et al. 2019): The aspect embed-
ding is combined with each word embedding, and then, an
attention mechanism is applied to help the model to focus
on context words related to the aspect term.
IAN-GRU (Abdelgwad et al. 2021): Employs BiGRU to
provide the hidden states of targets and context, followed by
two associated attention networks to learn the interactions
of aspects and their related context words.
MBRA (Al-Dabet et al. 2021): A memory module is
implemented using a stack of bidirectional independent
long short-term memory with three layers, followed by a
recurrent attention mechanism to handle long and complex
sentences.
AOA (Huang et al. 2018): This model adopts an atten-
tion-over-attention module to capture the interaction rela-
tionships between aspects and context sentences explicitly.
ASGCN-DG (Zhang et al. 2019): This model uses GCN
on the dependency tree of a sentence to leverage the syn-
tactical information and word dependencies to resolve the
problem of multi-word dependency for the ASC task.
SenticGCN (Liang et al. 2022): Similar to ASGCN, but
enhances the graph of the sentence using affective informa-
tion from BabelSenticNet.
BERT-Linear-pair (Abdelgwad et al. 2022): Fine-tuned
BERT with a sentence pair input for ASC task.
LCF-BERT (Zeng et al. 2019): Uses a local context focus
mechanism with an SRD threshold to help the model focus
on local context words and alleviate the negative influence
of unrelated sentiment tokens.
ASGCN-BERT: The BERT version of ASGCN-DG.
SenticGCN-BERT (Liang et al. 2022): The BERT version
of SenticGCN.
It is worth mentioning that AOA, LCF-BERT, and
ASGCN-DG were implemented based on a publicly avail-
able repository,1 while SenticGCN was implemented using
the official published source code.2
5 Results and discussion
5.1 Comparative analysis
The experimental results are illustrated in Table 5. They
show that the AraBERT-based models achieve better results
than AraVec-based models. This can be justified thanks to
the ability of AraBERT model to represent semantic fea-
tures better than context-independent word embeddings.
Additionally, AraBERT uses a WordPiece tokenizer that
splits unknown words into a set of sub-words, allowing bet-
ter handling of out of vocabulary (OOV) issues, especially
in morphologically rich languages like Arabic.
Besides, the graph-based (i.e., ASGCN-DG and Sen-
ticGCN) methods have outperformed attention-based models
(i.e., AB-LSTM-PC, IAN, AOA, and MBRA). This proves
1
https://​github.​com/​songy​ouwei/​ABSA-​PyTor​ch
2
https://​github.​com/​BinLi​ang-​NLP/​Sentic-​GCN

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Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6 Page 9 of 14 6

Table 6  Evaluation results of ablation study context words is more beneficial than down-weighting their
Model Accuracy (%) Macro F1 signals for the ASC task.
score (%)

ArBLCSNGCN-wo-LCF 90.37 75.17

5.2 Ablation study
ArBLCSNGCN-wo-global 90.24 75.88
ArBLCSNGCN-wo-BabelSenticNet 91.04 79.87
To further evaluate the impact of each component of
ArBLCSNGCN (ours) 92.77 81.59
our proposed model, an ablation study is performed on
ArBLCSNGCN model. The results are illustrated in Table 6.
The best results are marked in bold Removing the LCF layer leads to performance drop, which
indicates the importance of alleviating the negative influence

Fig. 4  Accuracy and macro F1

scores of our proposed model
using different numbers of GCN
layers

that extracting syntactical dependencies between contextual

of less-semantic-relative contextual words. Besides, ignoring
tokens and aspect words is beneficial for detecting the senti-
the global context features has decreased both accuracy and
ment polarities of aspects. Besides, the GCN-based models
F1 scores by 2.53% and 5.71%, respectively. This illustrates
are better at detecting long-range word dependencies com-
the importance of incorporating the AraBERT encoded
pared to attention-based models.
semantic features between context words and a given aspect
Furthermore, the SenticGCN model achieves better
for the ASC task. On the other hand, constructing the graph
results than ASGCN. This proves the efficiency of integrat-
for the sentence without using SenticNet has dropped the
ing affective knowledge from BabelSenticNet in enhancing
performance by ~ 1.73% for the accuracy score. This shows
word dependencies of the sentence, which is compatible
that integrating the affective information provided by Sen-
with the findings of previous studies (Liang et al. 2022).
ticNet between contextual opinion words and aspects is ben-
On the other hand, our proposed model (ArBLCSNGCN)
eficial in enhancing the prediction of sentiment polarities for
obtains the best results over all the baseline and related work
specific aspects.
models. It outperforms SenticGCN-BERT and LCF-BERT
by more than 1.8% for the accuracy score. This shows that
combining the global context features with the sentiment- 5.3 Impact of GCN layers
related dependencies between contextual words and specific
aspects while emphasizing the contribution of local context To investigate the impact of the number of GCN layers (L)
tokens that are relevant to target words has yielded better on the performance of the proposed model, we conducted
performance. a set of experiments on the ArBLCSNGCN model using
Additionally, integrating the CDM layer (ArBLCSNGCN different L values and checked the corresponding F1 and
(CDM)) leads to a better performance than using CDW. This accuracy scores. The number of layers varies from 1 to 7. As
indicates that masking features of less-semantic-relative shown in Fig. 4, the best results are achieved when L equals

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 6 Page 10 of 14 Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6

Fig. 5  Accuracy and macro

F1 scores of our model based
on different values of SRD
threshold

3. Nevertheless, the performance generally gets dropped 5.6 Case study

with the increase in layers’ number. This can be justified
because when the number of layers increases, the number of
parameters augments, and the model becomes too difficult
to train and hard to be generalized. Hence, L is set to 3 in
our experiments.
5.4 Impact of SRD
The impact of the dynamic masking technique on our pro-
posed model is validated by investigating the sensitivity of
the SRD thresholds on the model’s performance.
Figure 5 shows the experimental results of our best model
when using different SRD values that range from 0 to 7. It
can be seen that considering only the aspect word (SRD = 0)
and ignoring other related local context tokens is insuffi-
cient for the ASC. On the other hand, the ArBLCSNGCN
model achieves the best accuracy and F1 scores when SRD
is equal to 2. Therefore, the value of SRD is set to 2 in our
experiments.
We provide a case study with four different testing examples
to better understand how our model works. The predictions
of these examples using BERT-Linear-pair, LCF-BERT,
ASGCN-BERT, SenticGCN-BERT, and ArBLCSNGCN
are illustrated in Table 7.
Given the first example, i.e., ‫المبنى جميل والغرف ال بأس بها‬
(The building is beautiful and the rooms are okay),
BERT-Linear-pair model fails to identify the correct sen-
timent compared with the other models, including
ASGCN-BERT. This can be justified because the BERT-
pair model focuses on the adjective ‫( جميل‬beautiful),
which is related to the aspect ‫( المبنى‬building). Hence, this
shows the effectiveness of supplementing the semantic

5.5 Impact of fine‑tuning

We examined the effect of fine-tuning on the overall perfor-

mance of our best model by freezing the AraBERT’s param-
eters during training. Figure 6 illustrates the comparison
between the performance of the proposed model with and
without fine-tuning. The results show that the performance
has dropped significantly when setting the parameters fixed.
Thus, this indicated that fine-tuning on task-specific datasets
is indispensable to release the true power of AraBERT, espe- Fig. 6  The accuracy and macro F1 scores of our proposed model with
cially in low-resource settings. and without fine-tuning the AraBERT model

13
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6 Page 11 of 14 6

Table 7  Results of case study based on four different sentences, randomly selected from the test dataset
Reviews Aspect Models Predicted Label True label

AR: ‫المبنى جميل والغرف ال بأس بها‬ ‫( الغرف‬rooms) BERT-Linear-pair Positive Neutral
EN: The building is beautiful and the rooms are okay LCF-BERT Neutral
ASGCN-BERT Neutral
SenticGCN-BERT Neutral
ArBLCSNGCN (ours) Neutral
AR: ‫إذا كنت تود التعرض للسرقة فعليك بهذا المكان‬ ‫( المكان‬location) BERT-Linear-pair Positive Negative
EN: If you want to be robbed, you should visit this place LCF-BERT Positive
ASGCN-BERT Negative
SenticGCN-BERT Negative
ArBLCSNGCN (ours) Negative
AR: ‫ الغداء افضل بكثير‬,‫ و رغم أن الفطور عادي‬,‫االنترنت عادة جيدة‬ ‫الغداء‬ BERT-Linear-pair Neutral Positive
EN: The internet is usually good, and although breakfast is normal, (lunch) LCF-BERT Positive
lunch is much better
ASGCN-BERT Neutral
SenticGCN-BERT Positive
ArBLCSNGCN (ours) Positive
ً ‫ اإلفطار بطيء‬،‫ والتكييف يعمل‬،‫الفندق جيد! الغرف نظيفة ومريحة‬
AR: ‫قليال ولكن جيد‬ ‫اإلفطار‬ BERT-Linear-pair Positive Neutral
EN: The hotel is good! The rooms are clean and comfortable, the air- (breakfast) LCF-BERT Negative
conditioning works, the breakfast is a little slow but good
ASGCN-BERT Positive
SenticGCN-BERT Positive
ArBLCSNGCN (ours) Neutral

features extracted by AraBERT with the syntactic infor- 5.7 Limitations

mation and word dependency relations from GCN.
For the second example, i.e., ‫إذا كنت تود التعرض للسرقة‬
‫( فعليك بهذا المكان‬If you want to be robbed, you should visit
this place), LCF-BERT model fails to capture the correct
label compared to the other GCN-based models. This can
be due to the local context expression ‫( عليك ب‬you should)
that it is widely used for recommendation. Instead, GCN-
based models can capture syntactic dependencies to iden-
tify the negative sentiment conveyed by ‫( التعرض للسرقة‬be
robbed).
In the third example, the ASGCN-BERT model pre-
dicts a wrong label for the aspect ‫( الغداء‬lunch). This can
be justified by the fact that this model wrongly empha-
sizes the opinion word ‫( عادي‬normal), which is related to
the aspect breakfast. On the other hand, SenticGCN and
our model can focus on the key affective words (i.e., ‫افضل‬
(better)) related to this aspect.
For the last example, both ASGCN-BERT and Sen-
ticGCN-BERT predicted a wrong label for the aspect term
‫( اإلفطار‬breakfast). This can be justified because both
models emphasize the opinion word ‫( جيد‬good) and ignore
other local contextual words. In contrast, with the asso-
ciation between local and global context information, our
model detects the ambivalence in this sentence based on
the negative word ‫( بطيء‬slow).
Introducing a method’s limitations is essential for transpar-
ency and understanding its potential shortcomings. In this
section, we highlight the main limitations of our proposed
model.
• Dataset limited size Arabic is a low-resource language
that encounters challenges due to the limited availability
of corpora and their small sizes, especially in the context
of ABSA. Consequently, additional efforts are necessary
to create large-scale corpora in this field and augment the
existing ones through the collection of domain-specific
data.
• Data imbalance across classes The distribution of aspect
words across sentiment classes is highly imbalanced, as
illustrated in Table 3. This can lead to biased predictions
and reduced accuracy, particularly in minority classes.
To address the imbalance issue, techniques like oversam-
pling, undersampling, and SMOTE (synthetic minority
oversampling technique) can help balance the dataset. In
addition, data augmentation methods like back-transla-
tion can be explored to further increase the samples for
minority classes.
• Coverage limitations Knowledge bases like BabelSen-
ticNet are limited by the data they contain. They may

13
 6 Page 12 of 14
lack coverage for domain-specific or emerging con-
cepts. This limitation can lead to incomplete or inac-
curate results when analyzing text that falls outside
the knowledge base’s scope. Therefore, there is a need
to explore appropriate methods for expanding these
knowledge bases by incorporating domain-specific
terms and addressing missing words.
• Generic BERT model The AraBERT model used in this
study was pre-trained on generic corpora such as Wiki-
pedia content and news articles. While this model can
capture general language knowledge, it may lack spe-
cific domain-related terminology, context, and nuances.
To bridge the gap between the pre-trained and fine-
tuned data, we can explore further pre-training of the
AraBERT model on in-domain datasets and assess its
impact on the overall performance of our model.
6 Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed a combined method incorpo-
rating the AraBERT model with GCN and LCF layers to
capture the syntactic dependencies relevant to a specific
aspect while emphasizing the contribution of local con-
text words that are related to this aspect. In addition, we
explored enhancing the dependency graphs of the sentence
using the affective knowledge form BabelSenticNet data-
base. Experiments conducted on a reference Arabic hotel
dataset showed that the proposed model outperformed the
baseline and related work models, achieving an enhanced
accuracy score of 92.77%. Additionally, an ablation study
was conducted to prove the effectiveness of each com-
ponent of our proposed model. Moreover, we provided
a case study to validate our model’s performance in real
cases. Future work includes integrating additional senti-
ment features, particularly subjectivity, to evaluate their
impact on the overall performance of the proposed model.
In addition, other strategies for building weights of the
adjacency matrix will be explored. Moreover, we plan to
adapt this model to handle other ABSA tasks, including
aspect term extraction, and aspect category sentiment anal-
ysis. Besides, we intend to modify the proposed model to
jointly identify aspect terms and the corresponding senti-
ment polarities.
Author contributions Rajae Bensoltane: Conceptualization, Methodol-
ogy, Software, Validation, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writ-
ing - review & editing. Taher Zaki: Conceptualization, Methodology,
Investigation, Writing - review & editing, Supervision.
Funding The authors did not receive support from any organization
for the submitted work.
13
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:6
Declarations
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.
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