Developing Analytical Tools for Arabic Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Data

Abstract

Due to the widespread distribution of coronavirus and the existence of a massive quantity of data on social networking sites, particularly Twitter, there was an urgent need to develop a model that evaluates users’ emotions and determines how they feel about the pandemic. However, the absence of resources to assist Sentiment Analysis (SA) in Arabic hampered the completion of this endeavor. This work presents the ArSentiCOVID lexicon, the first and largest Arabic SA lexicon for COVID-19 that handles negation and emojis. We design a lexicon-based sentiment analyzer tool that depends mainly on the ArSentiCOVID lexicon to perform a three-way classification. Furthermore, we employ the sentiment analyzer to automatically assemble 42K annotated Arabic tweets for COVID-19. We conduct two experiments. First, we test the effect of applying negation and emoji rules to the created lexicon. The results indicate that after applying the emoji, negation, and both rules, the F-score improved by 2.13%, 4.13%, and 6.13%, respectively. Second, we applied an ensemble method that combines four feature groups (n-grams, negation, polarity, and emojis) as input features for eight Machine Learning (ML) classifiers. The results reveal that Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers work best, and that the four feature groups combined are best for representing features produced the maximum accuracy of (92.21%), precision (92.23%), recall (92.21%), and F-score (92.23%) with 3.2% improvement over the base model.