A review of sentiment analysis research in Arabic language

Sentiment analysis is a task of natural language processing which has recently attracted increasing attention. However, sentiment analysis research has mainly been carried out for the English language. Although Arabic is ramping up as one of the most used languages on the Internet, only a few studies have focused on Arabic sentiment analysis so far. In this paper, we carry out an in-depth qualitative study of the most important research works in this context by presenting limits and strengths of existing approaches. In particular, we survey both approaches that leverage machine translation or transfer learning to adapt English resources to Arabic and approaches that stem directly from the Arabic language

Cross-Lingual and Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis

Identifying sentiment in a low-resource language is essential for understanding opinions internationally and for responding to the urgent needs of locals affected by disaster incidents in different world regions. While tools and resources for recognizing sentiment in high-resource languages are plentiful, determining the most effective methods for achieving this task in a low-resource language which lacks annotated data is still an open research question. Most existing approaches for cross-lingual sentiment analysis to date have relied on high-resource machine translation systems, large amounts of parallel data, or resources only available for Indo-European languages. This work presents methods, resources, and strategies for identifying sentiment cross-lingually in a low-resource language. We introduce a cross-lingual sentiment model which can be trained on a high-resource language and applied directly to a low-resource language. The model offers the feature of lexicalizing the training data using a bilingual dictionary, but can perform well without any translation into the target language. Through an extensive experimental analysis, evaluated on 17 target languages, we show that the model performs well with bilingual word vectors pre-trained on an appropriate translation corpus. We compare in-genre and in-domain parallel corpora, out-of-domain parallel corpora, in-domain comparable corpora, and monolingual corpora, and show that a relatively small, in-domain parallel corpus works best as a transfer medium if it is available. We describe the conditions under which other resources and embedding generation methods are successful, and these include our strategies for leveraging in-domain comparable corpora for cross-lingual sentiment analysis. To enhance the ability of the cross-lingual model to identify sentiment in the target language, we present new feature representations for sentiment analysis that are incorporated in the cross-lingual model: bilingual sentiment embeddings that are used to create bilingual sentiment scores, and a method for updating the sentiment embeddings during training by lexicalization of the target language. This feature configuration works best for the largest number of target languages in both untargeted and targeted cross-lingual sentiment experiments. The cross-lingual model is studied further by evaluating the role of the source language, which has traditionally been assumed to be English. We build cross-lingual models using 15 source languages, including two non-European and non-Indo-European source languages: Arabic and Chinese. We show that language families play an important role in the performance of the model, as does the morphological complexity of the source language. In the last part of the work, we focus on sentiment analysis towards targets. We study Arabic as a representative morphologically complex language and develop models and morphological representation features for identifying entity targets and sentiment expressed towards them in Arabic open-domain text. Finally, we adapt our cross-lingual sentiment models for the detection of sentiment towards targets. Through cross-lingual experiments on Arabic and English, we demonstrate that our findings regarding resources, features, and language also hold true for the transfer of targeted sentiment

ArAutoSenti: Automatic annotation and new tendencies for sentiment classification of Arabic messages

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.A corpus-based sentiment analysis approach for messages written in Arabic and its dialects is presented and implemented. The originality of this approach resides in the automation construction of the annotated sentiment corpus, which relies mainly on a sentiment lexicon that is also constructed automatically. For the classification step, shallow and deep classifiers are used with features being extracted applying word embedding models. For the validation of the constructed corpus, we proceed with a manual reviewing and it was found that 85.17% were correctly annotated. This approach is applied on the under-resourced Algerian dialect and the approach is tested on two external test corpora presented in the literature. The obtained results are very encouraging with an F1-score that is up to 88% (on the first test corpus) and up to 81% (on the second test corpus). These results respectively represent a 20% and a 6% improvement, respectively, when compared with existing work in the research literature

A Fine-grained Multilingual Analysis Based on the Appraisal Theory: Application to Arabic and English Videos

International audienceThe objective of this paper is to compare the opinions of two videos in two different languages. To do so, a fine-grained approach inspired from the appraisal theory is used to analyze the content of the videos that concern the same topic. In general, the methods devoted to sentiment analysis concern the study of the polarity of a text or an utterance. The appraisal approach goes further than the basic polarity sentiments and consider more detailed sentiments by covering additional attributes of opinions such as: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. In order to achieve such a comparison, in AMIS (Chist-Era project), we collected a corpus of 1503 Arabic and 1874 English videos. These videos need to be aligned in order to compare their contents, that is why we propose several methods to make them comparable. Then the best one is selected to align them and to constitute the data-set necessary for the fine-grained sentiment analysis

Supervised sentiment analysis in multilingual environments

© 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. This version of the article: Vilares, D., Alonso, M.A. and Gómez-Rodríguez, C. (2017) ‘Supervised sentiment analysis in multilingual environments’ has been accepted for publication in Information Processing & Management, 53(3), pp. 595–607. The Version of Record is available online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2017.01.004.[Abstract]: This article tackles the problem of performing multilingual polarity classification on Twitter, comparing three techniques: (1) a multilingual model trained on a multilingual dataset, obtained by fusing existing monolingual resources, that does not need any language recognition step, (2) a dual monolingual model with perfect language detection on monolingual texts and (3) a monolingual model that acts based on the decision provided by a language identification tool. The techniques were evaluated on monolingual, synthetic multilingual and code-switching corpora of English and Spanish tweets. In the latter case we introduce the first code-switching Twitter corpus with sentiment labels. The samples are labelled according to two well-known criteria used for this purpose: the SentiStrength scale and a trinary scale (positive, neutral and negative categories). The experimental results show the robustness of the multilingual approach (1) and also that it outperforms the monolingual models on some monolingual datasets.This research was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (FFI2014-51978-C2) and Xunta de Galicia (R2014/034). David Vilares is funded by the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (FPU13/01180). Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez is funded by an Oportunius program grant (Xunta de Galicia).Xunta de Galicia; R2014/03