A comprehensive study for Arabic Sentiment Analysis (Challenges and Applications)

Deep learning has been very successful in the past decades, especially in Computer Vision and Speech Recognition fields. It has been also used successfully in the Natural Language Processing field because of the availability of an enormous amount of online text data, such as social networks and reviews websites, which have gained a lot of popularity and success in the past years. Sentiment Analysis is one of the hottest applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Many researchers have done excellent work on Sentiment Analysis for English language. However, the amount of work on Sentiment Analysis for Arabic language is, in comparison, very limited due to the complexity of the Arabic language's morphology and orthography. Unlike the English language, Arabic has many different dialects which makes Sentiment Analysis for Arabic more difficult and challenging, especially when working on data collected from social networks, which is known to be unstructured and noisy. Most of the work that has been done on Sentiment Analysis of Arabic language, focused on using lexicons and basic machine learning models. In addition, most of the work has been done on small datasets because of the limited number of the available annotated datasets for Arabic language. This paper proposes state-of-the-art research for Sentiment Analysis of Arabic microblogging using new techniques, and a sophisticated Arabic text data preprocessing.

Morphologically complex languages such as Arabic pose several challenges in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to their complexity and token sparsity. Most techniques approach the problem by transforming the words of the language from their sparse surface form representation to a less sparse form before processing. The transformation usually takes the form of a morphological analysis or a morphological segmentation. This dissertation addresses two tasks in Arabic NLP: Statistical Machine Translation(SMT) and Sentiment Analysis. To improve English-Arabic SMT, we apply segmentation on Arabic to decrease token sparsity and enhance the correspondence between tokens of the English and Arabic language. However, due to this segmentation, the translation system is limited to extracting features based on morphemes (partial words) and only outputting morphemes during decoding. Such a system lacks knowledge of the original form of the words. We further improve translation from English to Arabic by combining both segmented and desegmented views of the target language. The system can benefit from segmentation's sparsity reduction and verifies its generation of correct words. We present a language-independent technique to desegmentation that approaches the problem as a string transduction task. We propose a new algorithm that desegments the decoder's search space encoded as a lattice, thus allowing the system to use features from the desegmented view of the search space. We extend the phrase-based statistical machine translation system to allow desegmentation during the decoding process on the fly. In addition, we conduct an experimental study to verify what matters most in morphologically segmented SMT models. Our second task is sentiment analysis, where we resort to Arabic lemmatization to improve sentiment analysis of Arabic tweets and blog posts. We explore translation in the opposite direction, from Arabic into English in order to evaluate the loss of sentiment predictability when Arabic social media posts are translated to English, manually or using an SMT system. We use state-of-the-art Arabic and English sentiment Analysis systems and develop automatically generated Arabic lexicons from lemmatized tweets to improve this task.

Since Web 2.0 and the freedom to share information, perspectives, and opinions on global events, services, goods, etc., most of the content on social media platforms comes from users. Social media data includes user sentiment-related subjects. Due to its complexity, ambiguity, dialects, shortage of resources, and morphological diversity, little work has been done on Arabic sentiment analysis. This study introduces a novel word embedding model, AraWord2Vec, based on Wor2Vec trained on Wikipedia and the Sentiment Benchmark dataset. We also examined how Wor2Vec embedding models improved classification tasks. Second, a novel CM_BiLSTM deep learning model called Convolutional Max Pooling and Bidirectional LSTM is presented to enhance Arabic sentiment analysis. Our experimental findings revealed the performance of all models on diverse datasets with an accuracy of 98.47% in binary classification; in multi-classes classification, we obtained a high performance of 98.92%.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the world and has become an international public health emergency. The outbreak of COVID-19 has focused attention on the use of quarantine and social distancing as the primary defense strategies against community infection. Arabic language, as one of the most spoken languages in the world, and the fastest-growing language on the Internet motivates us to provide reliable automated tools that can perform sentiment analysis to reveal users' opinions. This paper was proposed to utilize machine learning (ML) methods for Arabic Sentiment Analysis to understand the positive and negative opinions related to quarantine and social distancing during the outbreak of COVID-19. We provided a model of different essential and ensembles ML classifiers and compared their effectiveness in classifying the collected imbalanced dataset. Moreover, the application of a variety of SMOTe (Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique) for our imbalanced dataset was evaluated. The results demonstrated that SMOTe Edited Nearest Neighbor (SMOTEENN) outperformed other SMOTe techniques. Moreover, the results showed that ensemble classifiers are more robust with imbalanced datasets than single classifiers. On the other hand, the overall average of F1 score of single classifiers is more robust than ensemble classifiers when applying SMOTEENN.

Sentiment analysis is one of the major fields in natural language processing whose main task is to extract sentiments, opinions, attitudes, and emotions from a subjective text. And for its importance in decision making and in people's trust with reviews on web sites, there are many academic researches to address sentiment analysis problems. Deep Learning (DL) is a powerful Machine Learning (ML) technique that has emerged with its ability of feature representation and differentiating data, leading to state-of-the-art prediction results. In recent years, DL has been widely used in sentiment analysis, however, there is scarce in its implementation in the Arabic language field. Most of the previous researches address other languages like English. The proposed model tackles Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA) by using a DL approach. ASA is a challenging field where Arabic language has a rich morphological structure more than other languages. In this work, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) as a deep neural network has been used for training the model combined with word embedding as a first hidden layer for features extracting. The results show an accuracy of about 82% is achievable using DL method.

With the development and emergence of the concept of the Web, as well as the advancement of social networks, forums, blogs and E-commerce a growing number of Arabs express their views and opinions using their native language on those platforms where we find a wealth of information that could be exploited. This information, whose size is expanding and which describes opinions, has become the subject of several research fields particularly: “Sentiment Analysis” or “Opinion Mining”. Sentiment Analysis considered a subfield of natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval and text mining. Currently, sentiment analysis is commonly used for English, while it is in its infancy in the Arabic language. The most important and critical step in feeling analysis is to select an appropriate technique for classifying feelings. In this paper, we will be reviewing the published work on the application of Deep Learning (DL) techniques to the problems of sentiment analysis. We focus on the Arabic language because of its importance, the large number of its speakers, the scarcity of Arabic resources on it and the challenges related to its work. We explain, categorize, summarize and compare the techniques offered in this area.

Sentiment analysis also referred to as opinion mining, plays a significant role in automating the identification of negative, positive, or neutral sentiments expressed in textual data. The proliferation of social networks, review sites, and blogs has rendered these platforms valuable resources for mining opinions. Sentiment analysis finds applications in various domains and languages, including English and Arabic. However, Arabic presents unique challenges due to its complex morphology characterized by inflectional and derivation patterns. To effectively analyze sentiment in Arabic text, sentiment analysis techniques must account for this intricacy. This paper proposes a model designed using the transformer model and deep learning (DL) techniques. The word embedding is represented by Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding (ArabBert), and then passed to the AraBERT model. The output of AraBERT is subsequently fed into a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model, followed by feedforward neural networks and an output layer. AraBERT is used to capture rich contextual information and LSTM to enhance sequence modeling and retain long-term dependencies within the text data. We compared the proposed model with machine learning (ML) algorithms and DL algorithms, as well as different vectorization techniques: term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), ArabBert, Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW), and skipGrams using four Arabic benchmark datasets. Through extensive experimentation and evaluation of Arabic sentiment analysis datasets, we showcase the effectiveness of our approach. The results underscore significant improvements in sentiment analysis accuracy, highlighting the potential of leveraging transformer models for Arabic Sentiment Analysis. The outcomes of this research contribute to advancing Arabic sentiment analysis, enabling more accurate and reliable sentiment analysis in Arabic text. The findings reveal that the proposed framework exhibits exceptional performance in sentiment classification, achieving an impressive accuracy rate of over 97%.

A review of sentiment analysis research in Arabic language

Arabic language has very rich vocabulary. It is manifested in different forms. The formal, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and the informal, colloquial or dialects. Dialectical languages become important as a result of the proliferation of social networks which resulted in the vast unstructured dialectical text available on the web. Unique properties of modern standard Arabic and dialects present major challenges to build sentiment analysis systems by adopting similar models designed for the English language. In this paper, we present a supervised Arabic sentiment analysis using a bag-of-words feature. We further examine using a set of key words (lexicon) for better polarity classification. The testing of the system is carried out on the freely-available Arabic books' reviews (LABR) dataset. LABR includes both modern standard Arabic and Egyptian dialectal reviews. We used both balanced and unbalanced datasets. Clearly, the balanced data set is small in size and, henceforth, a large-scale balanced dataset is required for training of the classifier model. Further, we compared the computed predicted sentiments against the actual reviews for a specific book. Findings, by annotators, had indicated ambiguity between a review and its rating when verified alongside the predicted sentiment, which provided a more reasonable result. Moreover, working with dialects and sarcasm is exceedingly exciting. Experimental results on the adopted logistic classifier model and LABR are encouraging and promising. However, a key prerequisite is the availability of rich and well represented datasets in order to develop robust and efficient Arabic sentiment analyzers.

The majority of available sentiment analysis systems treat English text, which resulted in a significant number of resources to assist researchers in this field. Unfortunately, this is not the case for other languages and, in particular, for the Arabic language. Few serious research attempts are reported to build necessary resources such as datasets to serve Arabic sentiment analysis research efforts. In order to expedite building necessary huge datasets in Arabic or any other dataset-poor language, automatic translation from a rich source-language can make a viable alternative to generate the required resources for a target language. This is mainly driven by the assumption that translation usually preserves the sentiment upto certain degree. In this work, we study the viability of this approach to automatically translate a huge dataset from English to Arabic for sentiment analysis purposes. Experimental results show that sentiment analysis of both original (English) dataset and the translated one (Arabic) produce comparable results. As a result, automatically translated English datasets shall add to the required resources for building robust Arabic sentiment analysis systems. Although automated translation may yield poor translations in terms of readability and comprehension by humans, sentiment analysis systems can still predict the majority of correct sentiments. Such sentiment is preserved by key words. We believe automated translation may be considered as a viable option to produce rich and well represented datasets in order to develop robust and efficient Arabic sentiment analyzers.

Retracted: Arabic feature-based level sentiment analysis using lexicon-based approach

Social media are considered an excellent source of information and can provide opinions, thoughts and insights toward various important topics. Sentiment analysis becomes a hot topic in research due to its importance in making decisions based on opinions derived from analyzing the user’s contents on social media. Although the Arabic language is one of the widely spoken languages used for content sharing across the social media, the sentiment analysis on Arabic contents is limited due to several challenges including the morphological structures of the language, the varieties of dialects and the lack of the appropriate corpora. Hence, the rapid increase in research in Arabic sentiment analysis is grown slowly in contrast to other languages such as English. The contribution of this paper is twofold: First, we introduce a corpus of forty thousand labeled Arabic tweets spanning several topics. Second, we present three deep learning models, namely CNN, LSTM and RCNN, for Arabic sentiment analysis. With the help of word embedding, we validate the performance of the three models on the proposed corpus. The experimental results indicate that LSTM with an average accuracy of 81.31% outperforms CNN and RCNN. Also, applying data augmentation on the corpus increases LSTM accuracy by 8.3%.

The rapid growth of social networks allows users to express their views on various topics, significantly impacting Sentiment Analysis (SA) in Natural Language Processing (NLP). SA extracts valuable insights and aids decision-making based on public sentiment in various domains, particularly education. In other words, Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA) improves educational outcomes by assessing students’ learning progress and monitoring their performance. SA faces challenges with the Arabic language due to its dialects and complex morphology. Deep Learning (DL) models, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have advanced SA by effectively capturing relevant features, outperforming traditional Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. This paper assesses FastText word embedding with a CNN-based model for Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA). Our results show that the CNN model with FastText achieves strong performance in both datasets, with higher classification accuracy in the first dataset compared to the second. Which confirms the effectiveness of this proposed model to evaluate website and MOOC content by measuring learner satisfaction through forum interactions and module evaluations.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The evolution of this pandemic has raised global health concerns, making people worry about how to protect themselves and their families. This has greatly impacted people’s sentiments. There was a dire need to investigate a large amount of social data such as tweets and others that emerged during the post-pandemic era for the assessment of people’s sentiments. As a result, this study aims at Arabic tweet-based sentiment analysis considering the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia. The datasets have been collected in two different periods in three major regions in Saudi Arabia, which are: Riyadh, Dammam, and Jeddah. Tweets were annotated with three sentiments: positive, negative, and neutral after due pre-processing. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and bi-directional long short memory (BiLSTM) deep learning algorithms were applied for classifying the sentiment of Arabic tweets. This experiment showed that the performance of CNN achieved 92.80% accuracy. The performance of BiLSTM was scored at 91.99% in terms of accuracy. Moreover, as an outcome of this study, an overwhelming upsurge in negative sentiments were observed in the dataset during COVID-19 compared to the negative sentiments of the dataset before COVID-19. The technique has been compared with the state-of-the-art techniques in the literature and it was observed that the proposed technique is promising in terms of various performance parameters.

The emergence of the Web 2.0 technology generated a massive amount of raw data by enabling Internet users to post their opinions, reviews, comments on the web. Processing this raw data to extract useful information can be a very challenging task. An example of important information that can be automatically extracted from the users' posts and comments is their opinions on different issues, events, services, products, etc. This problem of Sentiment Analysis (SA) has been studied well on the English language and two main approaches have been devised: corpus-based and lexicon-based. This paper addresses both approaches to SA for the Arabic language. Since there is a limited number of publically available Arabic dataset and Arabic lexicons for SA, this paper starts by building a manually annotated dataset and then takes the reader through the detailed steps of building the lexicon. Experiments are conducted throughout the different stages of this process to observe the improvements gained on the accuracy of the system and compare them to corpus-based approach.