Tracking sentiment towards news entities from Arabic news on social media

摘要

The tracking sentiment of the news entities over time provides important information to governments and enterprises during the decision-making process. Recently, it has attracted the attention of the research community as well due to its popularity in many applications including; tracking news about elections, e-commerce, and e-governance. However, most of the work is focused on English whereas limited contributions have been done for Arabic. Moreover, there are no annotated corpora in the Arabic news domain that can be used to perform the sentiment tracking task. In this research, we present an Arabic news corpus and its associated sentiment tracking system to monitor the sentiments towards news entities in the Arab world. Sentiment classification and Named Entity Recognition techniques are used to prepare the corpus for the tracking task. A sample dataset containing 7200 tweets was manually annotated to be used in building multiple classifiers and annotate more than 2.3M tweets using the semi-supervised technique. The results of sentiment classification by using different machine learning classifiers and internal testing set show that semi-automatically annotated dataset outperforms the manually annotated dataset by 23% and 16% on two-way and three-way classification respectively using Fl-score. The tracking results illustrate that over time the sentiment tracking performs well at discovering the most popular entities, from social media and, tracking their shifts in different Arab regions. It can be used to detect the possible reasons for sentiment change over time and, to predict the future sentiment of the news entities.