The increasing use of the internet enables users to share their opinion about what they like and dislike regarding products and services. For efficient decision making, there is a need to analyze these reviews. Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is commonly used to detect polarity (positive or negative) of reviews. But, it does not show the aspect or orientation of the text. In this study, state-of-art approaches based on supervised machine learning employed to perform three tasks on the dataset provided by SemEval. Tasks A and B are related to predicting the aspect of the restaurant’s reviews, whereas task C shows their polarity. Additionally, this study aims to compare the performance of two feature engineering techniques and five machine learning algorithms to evaluate their performance on a publicly available dataset named SemEval-2015 Task 12. The experimental results showed that the word2vec features when used with the support vector machine algorithm outperformed by giving 76%, 72% and 79% off overall accuracies for Task A, Task B, and Task C respectively. Our comparative study holds practical significance and can be used as a baseline study in the domain of aspect-based sentiment analysis.