A Lexicon-based Approach to Build Service Provider Reputation from Arabic Tweets in Twitter

Abstract

Nowadays Social media has become a popular com-munication tool among Internet users. Many users share opinions and experiences on different service providers everyday through the social media platforms. Thus, these platforms become valuable sources of data which can be exploited and used efficiently to support decision-making. However, finding and monitoring customers’ opinions on the social media is difficult task due to the fast growth of the content. This work focus on using Twitter for the task of building service providers’ reputation. Particularly, service provider’s reputation is calculated from the collected Saudi tweets in Twitter. To do so, a Saudi dialect lexicon has been developed as a basic component for sentiment polarity to classify words extracted from Twitter into either a positive or negative word. Then, beta probability density functions have been used to combine feedback from the lexicon to derive reputation scores. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach were consistent with the results of Qaym, a website that calculates restaurants’ rankings based on consumer ratings and comments.