Opinion mining and sentiment analysis for Arabic on-line texts: application on the political domain

• Published in: International journal of speech technology 2017-09, Vol.20 (3), p.575-585
• Main Authors: Najar, Dhekra, Mesfar, Slim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Annotations; Arabic language; Artificial Intelligence; Attitudes; Communications systems; Data mining; Discourse strategies; Engineering; Grammars; Monitoring; Polarity; Politics; Semantics; Sentiment analysis; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Social Sciences
• ISSN: 1381-2416; 1572-8110
• DOI: 10.1007/s10772-017-9422-4

Since the continuous proliferation of the journalistic content online and the changing political landscape in many Arabic countries, we started our current research in order to implement a media monitoring system about the opinion mining in political field. This system allows political actors, despite of the large volume of online data, to be constantly informed about opinions expressed on the web in order to properly monitor their actual standing, orient their communication strategy and prepare the election campaigns. The developed system is based on a linguistic approach using NooJ’s linguistic engine to formalize the automatic recognition rules and apply them to a dynamic corpus composed of journalistic articles. The first implemented rules allow identifying and annotating the different political entities (political actors and organizations). Then these annotations are used in our system of media monitoring in order to identify the opinions associated with the extracted named entities. The system is mainly based on a set of local grammars developed for the identification of different structures of the political opinion phrases. These grammars are using the entries of the opinion lexicon that contain the different opinion words (verbs, adjectives, nouns) where each entry is associated with the corresponding semantic marker (polarity and intensity). Our developed system is able to identify and properly annotate the opinion holder, the opinion target and the polarity (positive or negative) of the phraseological expression (nominal or verbal) expressing the opinion. Our experiments showed that the adopted method of extraction is consistent with 0.83 F-measure.