# Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: A Survey on Tasks, Approaches, and Challenges

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09516 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09516/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 134 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [How multilingual is Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01502/) (2019)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [Beto, Bentz, Becas: The Surprising Cross-Lingual Effectiveness of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09077/) (2019)
- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)
- [Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15005/) (2023)
- [Cross-Lingual Ability of Multilingual BERT: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07840/) (2019)
- [Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07001/) (2023)
- [Can ChatGPT Understand Too? A Comparative Study on ChatGPT and Fine-tuned BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10198/) (2023)
- [A Survey Of Cross-lingual Word Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04902/) (2017)
- [Knowing What, How and Why: A Near Complete Solution for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01616/) (2019)
- [Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00796/) (2021)
- [Position-Aware Tagging for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02609/) (2020)
- [Reasoning Implicit Sentiment with Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11255/) (2023)
- [Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg: Current Challenges and New Directions in Sentiment Analysis Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00357/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: Tasks, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01054/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Improving Generative Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Constrained Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10369/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task that focuses on understanding opinions at the aspect level, including sentiment towards specific aspect terms, categories, and opinions. While ABSA research has seen significant progress, much of the focus has been on monolingual settings. Cross-lingual ABSA, which aims to transfer knowledge from resource-rich languages (such as English) to low-resource languages, remains an under-explored area, with no systematic review of the field. This paper aims to fill that gap by providing a comprehensive survey of cross-lingual ABSA. We summarize key ABSA tasks, including aspect term extraction, aspect sentiment classification, and compound tasks involving multiple sentiment elements. Additionally, we review the datasets, modelling paradigms, and cross-lingual transfer methods used to solve these tasks. We also examine how existing work in monolingual and multilingual ABSA, as well as ABSA with LLMs, contributes to the development of cross-lingual ABSA. Finally, we highlight the main challenges and suggest directions for future research to advance cross-lingual ABSA systems.