Sentiment Analysis (SA) is an indispensable task for many real-world
applications. Compared to limited resourced languages (i.e., Arabic, Bengali),
most of the research on SA are conducted for high resourced languages (i.e.,
English, Chinese). Moreover, the reasons behind any prediction of the Arabic
sentiment analysis methods exploiting advanced artificial intelligence
(AI)-based approaches are like black-box - quite difficult to understand. This
paper proposes an explainable sentiment classification framework for the Arabic
language by introducing a noise layer on Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory
(BiLSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)-BiLSTM models that overcome
over-fitting problem. The proposed framework can explain specific predictions
by training a local surrogate explainable model to understand why a particular
sentiment (positive or negative) is being predicted. We carried out experiments
on public benchmark Arabic SA datasets. The results concluded that adding noise
layers improves the performance in sentiment analysis for the Arabic language
by reducing overfitting and our method outperformed some known state-of-the-art
methods. In addition, the introduced explainability with noise layer could make
the model more transparent and accountable and hence help adopting AI-enabled
system in practice.Comment: This is the pre-print version of our accepted paper at the 7th
International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Information
Retrieval~(ACM NLPIR'2023