Soutcom: Real‐time sentiment analysis of Arabic text for football fan satisfaction using a bidirectional LSTM

In the last few years, various topics, including sports, have seen social media platforms emerge as significant sources of information and viewpoints. Football fans use social media to express their opinions and sentiments about their favourite teams and players. Analysing these opinions can provide valuable information on the satisfaction of football fans with their teams. In this article, we present Soutcom, a scalable real‐time system that estimates the satisfaction of football fans with their teams. Our approach leverages the power of social media platforms to gather real‐time opinions and emotions of football fans and applies state‐of‐the‐art machine learning‐based sentiment analysis techniques to accurately predict the sentiment of Arabic posts. Soutcom is designed as a cloud‐based scalable system integrated with the X (formerly known as Twitter) API and a football data service to retrieve live posts and match data. The Arabic posts are analysed using our proposed bidirectional LSTM (biLSTM) model, which we trained on a custom dataset specifically tailored for the sports domain. Our evaluation shows that the proposed model outperforms other machine learning models such as Random Forest, XGBoost and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in terms of accuracy and F1‐score with values of 0.83 and 0.82, respectively. Furthermore, we analyse the inference time of our proposed model and suggest that there is a trade‐off between performance and efficiency when selecting a model for sentiment analysis on Arabic posts.