Opinion Mining and Analysis for Arabic Language

Social media constitutes a major component of Web 2.0 and includes social networks, blogs, forum discussions, micro-blogs, etc. Users of social media generate a huge volume of reviews and comments on a daily basis. These reviews and comments reflect the opinions of users about different issues, such as: products, news, entertainments, or sports. Therefore different establishments may need to analyze these reviews and comments. For examples: It is essential for companies to know the pros and cons of their products or services in the eyes of customers. Governments may want to know the attitude of people towards certain decisions, services, etc. Although the manual analysis of textual reviews and comments can be more accurate than the automatic methods, nonetheless, it is time consuming, expensive, and can be subjective. Furthermore, the huge amount of data contained in social networks can make it impractical to perform analysis manually. This paper focuses on evaluating Arabic social content. Currently, Middle East is an area rich of major political and social reforms. The social media can be a rich source of information to evaluate such contexts. In this research we developed an opinion mining and analysis tool to collect different forms of Arabic language (i.e. Standard or MSA, and colloquial). The tool accepts comments and opinions as input and generates polarity based outputs related to the comments. Additionally the tool can determine the comment or review is: (subjective or objective), (positive or negative), and (strong or weak). The evaluation of the performance of the developed tool showed that it yields more accurate results when it is applied on domain-based Arabic reviews relative to general-based Arabic reviews. Keywords—Sentiment Analysis; Arabic Sentiment Analysis; Opinion mining; Opinion Subjectivity; Opinion Polarity