ATE ABSITA@ EVALITA2020: Overview of the Aspect Term Extraction and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Task

Over the last years, the rise of novel sentiment analysis techniques to assess aspect-based opinions on product reviews has become a key component for providing valuable insights to both consumers and businesses. To this extent, we propose ATE\_ABSITA: the EVALITA 2020 shared task on Aspect Term Extraction and Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In particular, we approach the task as a cascade of three subtasks: Aspect Term Extraction (ATE), Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) and Sentiment Analysis (SA). Therefore, we invited participants to submit systems designed to automatically identify the "aspect terms" in each review and to predict the sentiment expressed for each aspect, along with the sentiment of the entire review.The task received broad interest, with 27 teams registered and more than 45 participants.However, only three teams submitted their working systems. The results obtained underline the task's difficulty, but they also show how it is possible to deal with it using innovative approaches and models. Indeed, two of them are based on large pre-trained language models as typical in the current state of the art for the English language.