SenZi: A Sentiment Analysis Lexicon for the Latinised Arabic (Arabizi)

Taha Tobaili, Miriam Fernandez, Harith Alani, Sanaa Sharafeddine, Hazem Hajj, Goran Glavaš


Abstract
Arabizi is an informal written form of dialectal Arabic transcribed in Latin alphanumeric characters. It has a proven popularity on chat platforms and social media, yet it suffers from a severe lack of natural language processing (NLP) resources. As such, texts written in Arabizi are often disregarded in sentiment analysis tasks for Arabic. In this paper we describe the creation of a sentiment lexicon for Arabizi that was enriched with word embeddings. The result is a new Arabizi lexicon consisting of 11.3K positive and 13.3K negative words. We evaluated this lexicon by classifying the sentiment of Arabizi tweets achieving an F1-score of 0.72. We provide a detailed error analysis to present the challenges that impact the sentiment analysis of Arabizi.
Anthology ID:
R19-1138
Volume:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019)
Month:
September
Year:
2019
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd.
Note:
Pages:
1203–1211
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/R19-1138
DOI:
10.26615/978-954-452-056-4_138
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Taha Tobaili, Miriam Fernandez, Harith Alani, Sanaa Sharafeddine, Hazem Hajj, and Goran Glavaš. 2019. SenZi: A Sentiment Analysis Lexicon for the Latinised Arabic (Arabizi). In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2019), pages 1203–1211, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd..
Cite (Informal):
SenZi: A Sentiment Analysis Lexicon for the Latinised Arabic (Arabizi) (Tobaili et al., RANLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/R19-1138.pdf