A Machine Learning Approach For Classifying Sentiments in Arabic Tweets

Nowadays, sentiment analysis methods become more and more popular especially with the proliferation of social media platform users number. In the same context, this paper presents a sentiment analysis approach which can faithfully translate the sentimental orientation of Arabic Twitter posts, based on a novel data representation and machine learning techniques. The proposed approach applied a wide range of features: lexical, surface-form, syntactic, etc. We also made use of lexicon features inferred from two Arabic sentiment words lexicons. To build our supervised sentiment analysis system, we use several standard classification methods (Support Vector Machines, K-Nearest Neighbour, Naive Bayes, Decision Trees, Random Forest) known by their effectiveness over such classification issues. In our study, Support Vector Machines classifier outperforms other supervised algorithms in Arabic Twitter sentiment analysis. Via an ablation experiments, we show the positive impact of lexicon based features on providing higher prediction performance.