OMAM at SemEval-2017 Task 4: Evaluation of English State-of-the-Art Sentiment Analysis Models for Arabic and a New Topic-based Model

Ramy Baly, Gilbert Badaro, Ali Hamdi, Rawan Moukalled, Rita Aoun, Georges El-Khoury, Ahmad El-Sallab, Hazem Hajj, Nizar Habash, Khaled Bashir Shaban, Wassim El-Hajj

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

While sentiment analysis in English has achieved significant progress, it remains a challenging task in Arabic given the rich morphology of the language. It becomes more challenging when applied to Twitter data that comes with additional sources of noise including dialects, misspellings, grammatical mistakes, code switching and the use of non-textual objects to express sentiments. This paper describes the “OMAM” systems that we developed as part of SemEval-2017 task 4. We evaluate English state-of-the-art methods on Arabic tweets for subtask A. As for the remaining subtasks, we introduce a topic-based approach that accounts for topic specificities by predicting topics or domains of upcoming tweets, and then using this information to predict their sentiment. Results indicate that applying the English state-of-the-art method to Arabic has achieved solid results without significant enhancements. Furthermore, the topic-based method ranked 1st in subtasks C and E, and 2nd in subtask D.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL 2017 - 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations, SemEval 2017, Proceedings of the Workshop
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages603-610
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781945626555
StatePublished - 2017
Event11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations, SemEval 2017, co-located with the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2017 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Aug 3 2017Aug 4 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations, SemEval 2017, co-located with the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2017
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period8/3/178/4/17

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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