New techniques and framework for sentiment analysis and tuning of CRM structure in the context of Arabic language

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyKnowing customers’ opinions regarding services received has always been important for businesses. It has been acknowledged that both Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can help companies take informed decisions to improve their performance in the decision-making process. However, real-word applications are not so straightforward. A company may face hard decisions over the differences between the opinions predicted by CRM and actual opinions collected in CEM via social media platforms. Until recently, how to integrate the unstructured feedback from CEM directly into CRM, especially for the Arabic language, was still an open question. Furthermore, an accurate labelling of unstructured feedback is essential for the quality of CEM. Finally, CRM needs to be tuned and revised based on the feedback from social media to realise its full potential. However, the tuning mechanism for CEM of different levels has not yet been clarified. Facing these challenges, in this thesis, key techniques and a framework are presented to integrate Arabic sentiment analysis into CRM. First, as text pre-processing and classification are considered crucial to sentiment classification, an investigation is carried out to find the optimal techniques for the pre-processing and classification of Arabic sentiment analysis. Recommendations for using sentiment analysis classification in MSA as well as Saudi dialects are proposed. Second, to deal with the complexities of the Arabic language and to help operators identify possible conflicts in their original labelling, this study proposes techniques to improve the labelling process of Arabic sentiment analysis with the introduction of neural classes and relabelling. Finally, a framework for adjusting CRM via CEM for both the structure of the CRM system (on the sentence level) and the inaccuracy of the criteria or weights employed in the CRM system (on the aspect level) are proposed. To ensure the robustness and the repeatability of the proposed techniques and framework, the results of the study are further validated with real-word applications from different domains

Techniques for improving the labelling process of sentiment analysis in the Saudi stock market

Sentiment analysis is utilised to assess users' feedback and comments. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in this topic due to the spread and expansion of social networks. Users' feedback and comments are written in unstructured formats, usually with informal language, which presents challenges for sentiment analysis. For the Arabic language, further challenges exist due to the complexity of the language and no sentiment lexicon is available. Therefore, labelling carried out by hand can lead to mislabelling and misclassification. Consequently, inaccurate classification creates the need to construct a relabelling process for Arabic documents to remove noise in labelling. The aim of this study is to improve the labelling process of the sentiment analysis. Two approaches were utilised. First, a neutral class was added to create a framework of reliable Twitter tweets with positive, negative, or neutral sentiments. The second approach was improving the labelling process by relabelling. In this study, the relabelling process applied to only seven random features (positive or negative): "earnings" (Arabic source), "losses" (Arabic source), "green colour" (Arabic source:Arabic source), "growing" (Arabic source), "distribution" (Arabic source), "decrease" (Arabic source), "financial penalty" (Arabic source), and "delay" (Arabic source). Of the 48 tweets documented and examined, 20 tweets were relabelled and the classification error was reduced by 1.34%

Classification of Encouragement (Targhib) And Warning (Tarhib) Using Sentiment Analysis on Classical Arabic

The Holy Qur’an is the main religious text of Islam. The Qur’an has its own methods of Targhib (encouragement) and Tarhib (warning), which are important features of the Qur’an. Most of the Quranic verses would urge and encourage people to do right and good deeds, and also warn them from committing evil and bad deeds. The method of classifying a text into two opposing opinions has been applied previously in solving the problem of sentiment analysis. Currently, it is applied in identifying between Targhib (encouragement) and Tarhib (warning) verses in the Qur’an. Each verse of the Qur’an can be treated as either an encouragement, warning or neutral. The language of the Holy Qur’an is one of the most challenging natural languages in sentiment analysis.  The aim of this work is to classify the verses of encouragement and warning using sentiment analysis and NLP techniques. Several approaches are used in the Sentiment Analysis classification, such as the machine learning approach, the lexicon-based approach and the hybrid approach. In carrying out this aim, the applied machine learning approach was used, where the impact of the use of different techniques such as POS tagging, N-Gram and Feature selection with correlation based were evaluated and investigated. 95.6% accuracy was achieved using Naïve Bayes (NB) and 91.5% accuracy was achieved using the Support Vector Machines (SVM). This study is a significant study in extracting information and knowledge from the Holy Qur’an. It is significant for both researchers in the field of Islamic studies as well as non-specialized researchers

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

Introduction to the special issue on cross-language algorithms and applications

With the increasingly global nature of our everyday interactions, the need for multilingual technologies to support efficient and efective information access and communication cannot be overemphasized. Computational modeling of language has been the focus of Natural Language Processing, a subdiscipline of Artificial Intelligence. One of the current challenges for this discipline is to design methodologies and algorithms that are cross-language in order to create multilingual technologies rapidly. The goal of this JAIR special issue on Cross-Language Algorithms and Applications (CLAA) is to present leading research in this area, with emphasis on developing unifying themes that could lead to the development of the science of multi- and cross-lingualism. In this introduction, we provide the reader with the motivation for this special issue and summarize the contributions of the papers that have been included. The selected papers cover a broad range of cross-lingual technologies including machine translation, domain and language adaptation for sentiment analysis, cross-language lexical resources, dependency parsing, information retrieval and knowledge representation. We anticipate that this special issue will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers interested in topics of cross-lingual natural language processing.Postprint (published version

Econometrics meets sentiment : an overview of methodology and applications

The advent of massive amounts of textual, audio, and visual data has spurred the development of econometric methodology to transform qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and to use those variables in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables. We survey this emerging research field and refer to it as sentometrics, which is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. We provide a synthesis of the relevant methodological approaches, illustrate with empirical results, and discuss useful software