NileTMRG at SemEval-2017 Task 4: Arabic Sentiment Analysis
This work addresses sentiment analysis for Arabic language processing, representing an incremental improvement with specific competition success.
The authors tackled Arabic sentiment analysis in SemEval-2017 Task 4, achieving first place in all three subtasks by using a sentiment analyzer with a scored lexicon for polarity classification and an ensemble of classifiers for topic-based and quantification tasks.
This paper describes two systems that were used by the authors for addressing Arabic Sentiment Analysis as part of SemEval-2017, task 4. The authors participated in three Arabic related subtasks which are: Subtask A (Message Polarity Classification), Sub-task B (Topic-Based Message Polarity classification) and Subtask D (Tweet quantification) using the team name of NileTMRG. For subtask A, we made use of our previously developed sentiment analyzer which we augmented with a scored lexicon. For subtasks B and D, we used an ensemble of three different classifiers. The first classifier was a convolutional neural network for which we trained (word2vec) word embeddings. The second classifier consisted of a MultiLayer Perceptron, while the third classifier was a Logistic regression model that takes the same input as the second classifier. Voting between the three classifiers was used to determine the final outcome. The output from task B, was quantified to produce the results for task D. In all three Arabic related tasks in which NileTMRG participated, the team ranked at number one.