Sentiment Analysis for Arabic Reviews using Machine Learning Classification Algorithms

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is an increasingly important field of study, also known as opinion mining, as it has the ability to identify the emotional tone of a source material as being either positive, negative, or neutral. Simply, SA digests natural languages and extracts insights, making it extremely useful to gain an overview of the public opinion in a certain issue, topic, or even a product. With the vast amount of information over social network platforms, shared views, website reviews, and blogs comes the importance of SA. Arabic is a rich language with extremely complex inflectional and derivational morphology making sentiment analysis in Arabic text more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance the accuracy of Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA). In this aspect, nine supervised machine learning algorithms have been implemented for ASA. Three of these classifiers have never been used before in ASA classification, namely, they are Ridge, Gradient Boosting, and Multi-layer Perceptron. The performance of all nine classifiers is tested using our constructed dataset. The dataset contains 6318 reviews written in different forms of Arabic language and prepared manually by gathering hotel reviews from Booking.com website.