Sentiment Classification of Arabic Documents: Experiments with multi-type features and ensemble algorithms

Document sentiment classification is often processed by applying machine learning techniques, in particular supervised learning which consists basically of two major steps: feature extraction and training the learning model. In the literature, most existing researches rely on n-grams as selected features, and on a simple basic classifier as learning model. In the context of our work, we try to improve document classification findings in Arabic sentiment analysis by combining different types of features such as opinion and discourse features; and by proposing an ensemble-based classifier to investigate its contribution in Arabic sentiment classification. Obtained results attained 85.06% in terms of macro-averaged Fmeasure, and showed that discourse features have moderately improved Fmeasure by approximately 3% or 4%.