Arabic Opinion Mining Using a Hybrid Recommender System Approach

Recommender systems nowadays are playing an important role in the delivery of services and information to users. Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) is the process of determining the attitude of textual opinions, whether they are positive, negative or neutral. Data sparsity is representing a big issue for recommender systems because of the insufficiency of user rating or absence of data about users or items. This research proposed a hybrid approach combining sentiment analysis and recommender systems to tackle the problem of data sparsity problems by predicting the rating of products from users reviews using text mining and NLP techniques. This research focuses especially on Arabic reviews, where the model is evaluated using Opinion Corpus for Arabic (OCA) dataset. Our system was efficient, and it showed a good accuracy of nearly 85 percent in predicting rating from review

Sentiment analysis of student's opinion on programming assessment using naive bayes algorithm on small data

Student opinion could be used to facilitate institutions to improve the quality of teaching and learning by delivering the appropriate teaching method based on the student’s learning experience. The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficiency of data mining techniques for the sentiment analysis of student opinion on programming subject assessment. Two machine learning algorithms, which are Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naïve Bayes (NB) have been identified to be the best in sentiment analysis on large data. SVM performs better than NB on big data but the case may not be the same on small dataset. The research aim is to design a framework that will investigate the efficiency of Naïve Bayes algorithm on two sentiment classification classes namely positive and negative on small dataset. A comparative performance measure is done using SVM and lexicon-based approach. Learning programming is considered as a difficult course for the beginners, specifically for the first-year student. The opinions of 175 first-year undergraduate students at School of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 2018/2019 session regarding their experience in the assessment of skill-based test 1 and test 2 were collected via an online survey. The result of classifying students’ opinions using the NB algorithm had a negative prediction accuracy of 92% and a positive prediction accuracy of 75%. NB had a prediction accuracy of 85% which outperformed both the SVM with 70% and lexicon-based approach with 60% accuracy. The result shows that NB works better than SVM and Lexicon-based approach on small dataset. The findings from the analysis of the survey show that the student’s sentiment is classified as negative, which implies that the skill-based test is difficult and gives scary emotions to the students which may further affect students interest in programming assessment. The key finding of this study discovers that the policy of awarding zero scores to students’ whose program did not compile successfully, hinders the programming assessment of first-year undergraduate students in the School of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

An expandable Arabic lexicon and valence shifter rules for sentiment analysis on twitter

Sentiment analysis (SA) refers as computational and natural language processing techniques used to extract subjective information expressed in a text. In this SA study, three main problems are addressed: a) absence of resources on Palestinian Arabic dialect (PAL), b) emergence of new sentiment words, hence decreases the performance of sentiment analysis models when applied on tweets collected, and c) handling valence shifter words were not thoroughly addressed in Arabic sentiment analysis. Therefore, this study aims to construct a PAL lexicon for Palestinian tweets and to design an Expandable and Up-to-date Lexicon for Arabic (EULA). A new valence shifter rules in enhancing the performance of lexicon-based sentiment analysis on Arabic tweets is also been constructed. In this study, a PAL lexicon is built by using phonology matching algorithm while EULA is constructed by harnessing a general lexicon on a tweets dataset to find new terms and predict its polarity through some linguistic rules. Furthermore, a set of rules are proposed to handle the valence shifters words by applying rules to find the scope of words, and shifting value that is produced by these words. Palestinian and Arabic tweets datasets from March to May 2018 are used to evaluate the proposed idea. Experimental results indicate that the proposed PAL lexicon has produced better results compared to other lexicons when tested on Palestinian dataset. Meanwhile, EULA enhanced the performance of lexicon-based approach to be competitive with machine learning approach. Moreover, applying the proposed valence shifter rules have increased overall performance of 5% on average. The new proposed PAL sentiment lexicon is able to handle Palestinian’s dialects. Furthermore, the EULA has overcome the emergence of new slang words in social media. Moreover, the constructed valence shifter rules are capable to handle negation, intensifiers and contrasts in enhancing the performance of Arabic sentiment analysis

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

Sentiment Analysis for the Low-Resourced Latinised Arabic "Arabizi"

The expansion of digital communication mediums from private mobile messaging into the public through social media presented an opportunity for the data science research and industry to mine the generated big data for artificial information extraction. A popular information extraction task is sentiment analysis, which aims at extracting polarity opinions, positive, negative, or neutral, from the written natural language. This science helped organisations better understand the public’s opinion towards events, news, public figures, and products. However, sentiment analysis has advanced for the English language ahead of Arabic. While sentiment analysis for Arabic is developing in the literature of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a popular variety of Arabic, Arabizi, has been overlooked for sentiment analysis advancements. Arabizi is an informal transcription of the spoken dialectal Arabic in Latin script used for social texting. It is known to be common among the Arab youth, yet it is overlooked in efforts on Arabic sentiment analysis for its linguistic complexities. As to Arabic, Arabizi is rich in inflectional morphology, but also codeswitched with English or French, and distinctively transcribed without adhering to a standard orthography. The rich morphology, inconsistent orthography, and codeswitching challenges are compounded together to have a multiplied effect on the lexical sparsity of the language, where each Arabizi word becomes eligible to be spelled in many ways, that, in addition to the mixing of other languages within the same textual context. The resulting high degree of lexical sparsity defies the very basics of sentiment analysis, classification of positive and negative words. Arabizi is even faced with a severe shortage of data resources that are required to set out any sentiment analysis approach. In this thesis, we tackle this gap by conducting research on sentiment analysis for Arabizi. We addressed the sparsity challenge by harvesting Arabizi data from multi-lingual social media text using deep learning to build Arabizi resources for sentiment analysis. We developed six new morphologically and orthographically rich Arabizi sentiment lexicons and set the baseline for Arabizi sentiment analysis on social media