Title: Replication issues in syntax-based aspect extraction for opinion mining,
Abstract: Reproducing experiments is an important instrument to validate previous work
and build upon existing approaches. It has been tackled numerous times in
different areas of science. In this paper, we introduce an empirical
replicability study of three well-known algorithms for syntactic centric
aspect-based opinion mining. We show that reproducing results continues to be a
difficult endeavor, mainly due to the lack of details regarding preprocessing
and parameter setting, as well as due to the absence of available
implementations that clarify these details. We consider these are important
threats to validity of the research on the field, specifically when compared to
other problems in NLP where public datasets and code availability are critical
validity components. We conclude by encouraging code-based research, which we
think has a key role in helping researchers to understand the meaning of the
state-of-the-art better and to generate continuous advances.