Arabic Dialect Texts Classification

This study investigates how to classify Arabic dialects in text by extracting features which show the differences between dialects. There has been a lack of research about classification of Arabic dialect texts, in comparison to English and some other languages, due to the lack of Arabic dialect text corpora in comparison with what is available for dialects of English and some other languages. What is more, there is an increasing use of Arabic dialects in social media, so this text is now considered quite appropriate as a medium of communication and as a source of a corpus. We collected tweets from Twitter, comments from Facebook and online newspapers from five groups of Arabic dialects: Gulf, Iraqi, Egyptian, Levantine, and North African. The research sought to: 1) create a dataset of Arabic dialect texts to use in training and testing the system of classification, 2) find appropriate features to classify Arabic dialects: lexical (word and multi-word-unit) and grammatical variation across dialects, 3) build a more sophisticated filter to extract features from Arabic-character written dialect text files. In this thesis, the first part describes the research motivation to show the reason for choosing the Arabic dialects as a research topic. The second part presents some background information about the Arabic language and its dialects, and the literature review shows previous research about this subject. The research methodology part shows the initial experiment to classify Arabic dialects. The results of this experiment showed the need to create an Arabic dialect text corpus, by exploring Twitter and online newspaper. The corpus used to train the ensemble classifier and to improve the accuracy of classification the corpus was extended by collecting tweets from Twitter based on the spatial coordinate points and comments from Facebook posts. The corpus was annotated with dialect labels and used in automatic dialect classification experiments. The last part of this thesis presents the results of classification, conclusions and future work

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

An Experimental Study on Sentiment Classification of Moroccan dialect texts in the web

With the rapid growth of the use of social media websites, obtaining the users' feedback automatically became a crucial task to evaluate their tendencies and behaviors online. Despite this great availability of information, and the increasing number of Arabic users only few research has managed to treat Arabic dialects. The purpose of this paper is to study the opinion and emotion expressed in real Moroccan texts precisely in the YouTube comments using some well-known and commonly used methods for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we present our work of Moroccan dialect comments classification using Machine Learning (ML) models and based on our collected and manually annotated YouTube Moroccan dialect dataset. By employing many text preprocessing and data representation techniques we aim to compare our classification results utilizing the most commonly used supervised classifiers: k-nearest neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), and deep learning (DL) classifiers such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LTSM). Experiments were performed using both raw and preprocessed data to show the importance of the preprocessing. In fact, the experimental results prove that DL models have a better performance for Moroccan Dialect than classical approaches and we achieved an accuracy of 90%.Comment: 13 pages, 5 tables, 2 figure

Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial 2018)

Peer reviewe

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 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