Dania Refai

Dania Refai, Saleh Abo-Soud, Mohammad Abdel-Rahman

The performance of learning models heavily relies on the availability and adequacy of training data. To address the dataset adequacy issue, researchers have extensively explored data augmentation (DA) as a promising approach. DA generates new data instances through transformations applied to the available data, thereby increasing dataset size and variability. This approach has enhanced model performance and accuracy, particularly in addressing class imbalance problems in classification tasks. However, few studies have explored DA for the Arabic language, relying on traditional approaches such as paraphrasing or noising-based techniques. In this paper, we propose a new Arabic DA method that employs the recent powerful modeling technique, namely the AraGPT-2, for the augmentation process. The generated sentences are evaluated in terms of context, semantics, diversity, and novelty using the Euclidean, cosine, Jaccard, and BLEU distances. Finally, the AraBERT transformer is used on sentiment classification tasks to evaluate the classification performance of the augmented Arabic dataset. The experiments were conducted on four sentiment Arabic datasets: AraSarcasm, ASTD, ATT, and MOVIE. The selected datasets vary in size, label number, and unbalanced classes. The results show that the proposed methodology enhanced the Arabic sentiment text classification on all datasets with an increase in F1 score by 4% in AraSarcasm, 6% in ASTD, 9% in ATT, and 13% in MOVIE.

Dania Refai, Alaa Dalaq, Doaa Dalaq et al.

Natural language processing (NLP), particularly sentiment analysis, plays a vital role in areas like marketing, customer service, and social media monitoring by providing insights into user opinions and emotions. However, progress in Arabic sentiment analysis remains limited due to the lack of large, high-quality labeled datasets. While active learning has proven effective in reducing annotation efforts in other languages, few studies have explored it in Arabic sentiment tasks. Likewise, the use of large language models (LLMs) for assisting annotation and comparing their performance to human labeling is still largely unexplored in the Arabic context. In this paper, we propose an active learning framework for Arabic sentiment analysis designed to reduce annotation costs while maintaining high performance. We evaluate multiple deep learning architectures: Specifically, long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent units (GRU), and recurrent neural networks (RNN), across three benchmark datasets: Hunger Station, AJGT, and MASAC, encompassing both modern standard Arabic and dialectal variations. Additionally, two annotation strategies are compared: Human labeling and LLM-assisted labeling. Five LLMs are evaluated as annotators: GPT-4o, Claude 3 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, DeepSeek Chat, and LLaMA 3 70B Instruct. For each dataset, the best-performing LLM was used: GPT-4o for Hunger Station, Claude 3 Sonnet for AJGT, and DeepSeek Chat for MASAC. Our results show that LLM-assisted active learning achieves competitive or superior performance compared to human labeling. For example, on the Hunger Station dataset, the LSTM model achieved 93% accuracy with only 450 labeled samples using GPT-4o-generated labels, while on the MASAC dataset, DeepSeek Chat reached 82% accuracy with 650 labeled samples, matching the accuracy obtained through human labeling.