Improving sentiment analysis in Arabic: A combined approach

Abstract

Sentiment analysis SA is concerned with determining users’ opinions from text reviews. However, mining these opinions from massive amounts of unstructured and lengthy documents is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose methods that extract valuable opinions and values from online movie reviews to improve SA in Arabic. First, we propose a method that explores the role of n-gram and skip-n-gram models in opinion classification. Second, we study a method that exploits subjective words such as adjectives and nouns by applying Part-Of Speech tagging. Both of the methods are combined with a feature reduction technique to enhance SA results. Third, we present a method that seeks to extract relevant opinions such as review summaries and conclusion opinions. Then, a combined approach is proposed to augment opinion classification results. Forth, we introduce a method for analyzing customers’ opinions by determining factors impacting their attitudes based on the costumer value model. Experimental results conducted on two datasets prove that our proposed methods are effective and provide better scores than baseline sentiment classifiers. The best obtained classification results reached 96% in F-Measure. These results indicate also that the aesthetic factor is the most influent factor in Arabic movie reviews.

Keywords

• Text mining
• Opinion mining
• Sentiment classification
• Review extraction
• Combined approach