Abstract-Most social media commentary in the Arabic language space is made using unstructured non-grammatical slang Arabic language, presenting complex challenges for sentiment analysis and opinion extraction of online commentary and micro blogging data in this important domain. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the important research works in the field of Arabic sentiment analysis. An in-depth qualitative analysis of the various features of the research works is carried out and a summary of objective findings is presented. We used smoothness analysis to evaluate the percentage error in the performance scores reported in the studies from their linearly-projected values (smoothness) which is an estimate of the influence of the different approaches used by the authors on the performance scores obtained. To solve a bounding issue with the data as it was reported, we modified existing logarithmic smoothing technique and applied it to pre-process the performance scores before the analysis. Our results from the analysis have been reported and interpreted for the various performance parameters: accuracy, precision, recall and F-score.

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Sentiment analysis (SA) techniques are applied to assess aspects of language that are used to express feelings, evaluations and opinions in areas such as customer sentiment extraction. Most studies have focused on SA techniques for widely used languages such as English, but less attention has been paid to Arabic, particularly the Saudi dialect. Most Arabic SA studies have built systems using supervised approaches that are domain dependent; hence, they achieve low performance when applied to a new domain different from the learning domain, and they require manually labelled training data, which are usually difficult to obtain. In this article, we propose a novel lexicon-based algorithm for Saudi dialect SA that features domain independence. We created an annotated Saudi dialect dataset and built a large-scale lexicon for the Saudi dialect. Then, we developed our weighted lexicon-based algorithm. The proposed algorithm mines the associations between polarity and non-polarity words for the dataset and then weights these words based on their associations. During algorithm development, we also proposed novel rules for handling some linguistic features such as negation and supplication. Several experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

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