Open issues in the sentiment analysis of Arabic social media: A case study

Abstract

With the rapid increase in the volume of Arabic opinionated posts on different microblogging mediums comes an increasing demand for Arabic sentiment analysis tools. Yet, research in the area of Arabic sentiment analysis is progressing at a very slow pace compared to that being carried out in English and other languages. This paper highlights the major problems and open research issues that face sentiment analysis of Arabic social media. The paper also presents a case study the goal of which is to investigate the possibility of determining the semantic orientation of Arabic Egyptian tweets and comments given limited Arabic resources. One of the outcomes of the presented study, is an Egyptian dialect sentiment lexicon.