Sentiment Analysis in the Arabic Language Using Machine Learning

Sentiment Analysis in the Arabic Language Using Machine Learning Sentiment analysis has recently become one of the growing areas of research related to natural language processing and machine learning. Much opinion and sentiment about specific topics are available online, which allows several parties such as customers, companies and even governments, to explore these opinions. The first task is to classify the text in terms of whether or not it expresses opinion or factual information. Polarity classification is the second task, which distinguishes between polarities (positive, negative or neutral) that sentences may carry. The analysis of natural language text for the identification of subjectivity and sentiment has been well studied in terms of the English language. Conversely, the work that has been carried out in terms of Arabic remains in its infancy; thus, more cooperation is required between research communities in order for them to offer a mature sentiment analysis system for Arabic. There are recognized challenges in this field; some of which are inherited from the nature of the Arabic language itself, while others are derived from the scarcity of tools and sources. This dissertation provides the rationale behind the current work and proposed methods to enhance the performance of sentiment analysis in the Arabic language. The first step is to increase the resources that help in the analysis process; the most important part of this task is to have annotated sentiment corpora. Several free corpora are available for the English language, but these resources are still limited in other languages, such as Arabic. This dissertation describes the work undertaken by the author to enrich sentiment analysis in Arabic by building a new Arabic Sentiment Corpus. The data is labeled not only with