Sentiment analysis in Arabic: A review of the literature

Within the last couple of years, Sentiment Analysis in Arabic has gained a considerable interest from the research community. In this respect, the objective of this paper is to provide a review of the major works that have dealt with this research area in this language. A thorough investigation of the available literature revealed that the works were mainly concentrated on dealing with specific Sentiment Analysis tasks. To this end, they used three different approaches, namely supervised, unsupervised and hybrid. The results that these studies achieved are interesting but divergent. This divergence is relatively due to the type of approach opted for, the task that is being analysed as well as to the specificities and intricacies of the Arabic variety understudy. © 2017 Ain Shams University.