LABR: A Large Scale Arabic Sentiment Analysis Benchmark
This addresses the problem of limited resources for Arabic sentiment analysis, though it is incremental as it builds on existing work by expanding dataset size and analysis.
The authors tackled the lack of a large-scale sentiment analysis dataset for Arabic by introducing LABR, which includes over 63,000 book reviews with ratings, and they provided standard splits and analysis for classification tasks.
We introduce LABR, the largest sentiment analysis dataset to-date for the Arabic language. It consists of over 63,000 book reviews, each rated on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. We investigate the properties of the dataset, and present its statistics. We explore using the dataset for two tasks: (1) sentiment polarity classification; and (2) ratings classification. Moreover, we provide standard splits of the dataset into training, validation and testing, for both polarity and ratings classification, in both balanced and unbalanced settings. We extend our previous work by performing a comprehensive analysis on the dataset. In particular, we perform an extended survey of the different classifiers typically used for the sentiment polarity classification problem. We also construct a sentiment lexicon from the dataset that contains both single and compound sentiment words and we explore its effectiveness. We make the dataset and experimental details publicly available.