Sentiment classification of Arabic tweets: A supervised approach

Social media platforms have proven to be a powerful source of opinion sharing. Thus, mining and analyzing these opinions has an important role in decision-making and product benchmarking. However, the manual processing of the huge amount of content that these web-based applications host is an arduous task. This has led to the emergence of a new field of research known as Sentiment Analysis. In this respect, our objective in this work is to investigate sentiment classification in Arabic tweets using machine learning. Three classifiers namely NaÏve Bayes, Support Vector Machine and K-Nearest Neighbor were evaluated on an in-house developed dataset using different features. A comparison of these classifiers has revealed that Support Vector Machine outperforms others classifiers and achieves a 78% accuracy rate. © Rinton Press.