Sentiment Analysis of Arabic tweets is a complex task due to the rich morphology of the Arabic language and the informal nature of language on Twitter. Previous research on sentiment analysis of tweets mainly focused on manually extracting features from the text. Recently, neural word embeddings have been utilized as less labor-intensive representations than manual feature engineering. Most of these word-embeddings model the syntactic information of words while ignoring the sentiment context. In this paper, we propose to learn sentiment specific word embeddings from Arabic tweets and use them in Arabic Twitter sentiment classification. Moreover, we propose a feature ensemble model of surface and deep features. The surface features are manually extracted features, and the deep features are generic word embeddings and sentiment-specific word embeddings. Extensive experiments are performed to test the effectiveness of the surface and deep features ensemble, pooling functions, embeddings size, and cross-dataset models. The recent language representation model BERT is also evaluated on the task of Sentiment Analysis of Arabic tweets. The models are evaluated on three different datasets of Arabic tweets, and they outperform previous results on all these datasets with a significant increase in the F-score. The experimental results demonstrate that (1) the highest performing model is the ensemble of surface and deep features, and (2) the approach achieves state-of the-art results on several benchmarking datasets.

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed a boom in language representation models with the introduction of pretrained language models that are trained on massive textual data then used to fine-tune downstream NLP tasks. In this paper, we aim to study the evolution of language representation models by analyzing their effect on an under-researched NLP task: emotion analysis; for a low-resource language: Arabic. Most of the studies in the field of affect analysis focused on sentiment analysis, i.e., classifying text into valence (positive, negative, neutral) while few studies go further to analyze the finer grained emotional states (happiness, sadness, anger, etc.). Emotion analysis is a text classification problem that is tackled using machine learning techniques. Different language representation models have been used as features for these machine learning models to learn from. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on the evolution of language models, from the traditional term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) to the more sophisticated word embedding word2vec, and finally the recent state-of-the-art pretrained language model, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). We observe and analyze how the performance increases as we change the language model. We also investigate different BERT models for Arabic. We find that the best performance is achieved with the ArabicBERT large model, which is a BERT model trained on a large dataset of Arabic text. The increase in F1-score was significant +7–21%.

Recently, subjectivity and sentiment analysis of Arabic has received much attention from the research community. In the past two years, an enormous number of references in the field have emerged compared to what has been published in previous years. In this paper, we present an updated survey of the emerging research on subjectivity and sentiment analysis of Arabic. We also highlight the challenges and future research directions in this field.

A series of mitigation efforts were implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia, including the development of mobile health applications (mHealth apps) for the public. Assessing the acceptability of mHealth apps among the public is crucial. This study aimed to use Twitter to understand public perceptions around the use of six Saudi mHealth apps used during COVID-19: “Sehha”, “Mawid”, “Sehhaty”, “Tetamman”, “Tawakkalna”, and “Tabaud”. We used two methodological approaches: network and sentiment analysis. We retrieved Twitter data using specific mHealth apps-related keywords. After including relevant tweets, our final mHealth app networks consisted of a total of 4995 Twitter users and 8666 conversational relationships. The largest networks in size (i.e., the number of users) and volume (i.e., the conversational relationships) among all were “Tawakkalna” followed by “Tabaud”, and their conversations were led by diverse governmental accounts. In contrast, the four remaining mHealth networks were mainly led by the health sector and media. Our sentiment analysis approach included five classes and showed that most conversations were neutral, which included facts or information pieces and general inquires. For the automated sentiment classifier, we used Support Vector Machine with AraVec embeddings as it outperformed the other tested classifiers. The sentiment classifier showed an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 85%. Future studies can use social media and real-time analytics to improve mHealth apps’ services and user experience, especially during health crises.