An analytical study of Arabic sentiments: Maktoob case study

The problem of automatically extracting opinions and emotions from textual data have gained a lot of interest recently. Unfortunately, most studies on Sentiment Analysis (SA) focus mainly on the English language, whereas studies considering other important and wide-spread languages such as Arabic are few. Moreover, publicly-available Arabic datasets are seldom found on the Web. In this work, a labeled dataset of Arabic reviews/comments is collected from a social networking website (Yahoo!-Maktoob). A detailed analysis of different aspects of the collected dataset such as the reviews' length, the numbers of likes/dislikes, the polarity distribution and the languages used is presented. Finally, the dataset is used to test popular classifiers commonly used for SA.