Deep Learning for Sentiment Analysis of Arabic Text

Abstract

Deep learning has been very successful in the past decades, especially in Computer Vision and Speech Recognition fields. It has been also used successfully in the Natural Language Processing field because of the availability of an enormous amount of online text data, such as social networks and reviews websites, which have gained a lot of popularity and success in the past years. Sentiment Analysis is one of the hottest applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Many researchers have done excellent work on Sentiment Analysis for English language. However, the amount of work on Sentiment Analysis for Arabic language is, in comparison, very limited due to the complexity of the Arabic language's morphology and orthography. Unlike the English language, Arabic has many different dialects which makes Sentiment Analysis for Arabic more difficult and challenging, especially when working on data collected from social networks, which is known to be unstructured and noisy. Most of the work that has been done on Sentiment Analysis of Arabic language, focused on using lexicons and basic machine learning models. In addition, most of the work has been done on small datasets because of the limited number of the available annotated datasets for Arabic language. This paper proposes state-of-the-art research for Sentiment Analysis of Arabic microblogging using new techniques, and a sophisticated Arabic text data preprocessing.