CLASENTI: A class-specific sentiment analysis framework

Abstract

Arabic text sentiment analysis suffers from low accuracy due to Arabic-specific challenges (e.g., limited resources, morphological complexity, and dialects) and general linguistic issues (e.g., fuzziness, implicit sentiment, sarcasm, and spam). The limited resources problem requires efforts to build new and improved Arabic corpora and lexica. We propose a class-specific sentiment analysis (CLASENTI) framework. The framework includes a new annotation approach to build multi-faceted Arabic corpus and lexicon allowing for simultaneous annotation of different facets, including domains, dialects, linguistic issues, and polarity strengths. Each of these facets has multiple classes (e.g., the nine classes representing dialects found in the Arab world). The new corpus and lexicon annotations facilitate the development of new class-specific classification models and polarity strength calculation. For the new sentiment classification models, we propose a hybrid model combining corpus-based and lexicon-based models. The corpus-based model has two interrelated phases to build; (1) full-corpus classification models for all facets; and (2) class-specific models trained on filtered subsets of the corpus according to the performances of the full-corpus models. To calculate polarity strengths, the lexicon-based model filters the annotated lexicon based on the specific classes of the domain and dialect. As a case study, we collect and annotate 15274 reviews from various sources, including surveys, Facebook comments, and Twitter posts, pertaining to governmental services. In addition, we develop a new web-based application to apply the proposed framework on the case study. CLASENTI framework reaches up to 95% accuracy and 93% F1-Score surpassing the best-known sentiment classifiers implemented in Scikit-learn library that achieve 82% accuracy and 81% F1-Score for Arabic when tested on the same dataset.