Sentiment analysis is an essential process which is important to many natural language applications. In this paper, we apply two models for Arabic sentiment analysis to the ASTD and ATDFS datasets, in both 2-class and multiclass forms. Model MC1 is a 2-layer CNN with global average pooling, followed by a dense layer. MC2 is a 2-layer CNN with max pooling, followed by a BiGRU and a dense layer. On the difficult ASTD 4-class task, we achieve 73.17%, compared to 65.58% reported by Attia et al., 2018. For the easier 2-class task, we achieve 90.06% with MC1 compared to 85.58% reported by Kwaik et al., 2019. We carry out experiments on various data splits, to match those used by other researchers. We also pay close attention to Arabic preprocessing and include novel steps not reported in other works. In an ablation study, we investigate the effect of two steps in particular, the processing of emoticons and the use of a custom stoplist. On the 4-class task, these can make a difference of up to 4.27% and 5.48%, respectively. On the 2-class task, the maximum improvements are 2.95% and 3.87%.

In this paper, we create EMIR, the first-ever Music Information Retrieval dataset for Ethiopian music. EMIR is freely available for research purposes and contains 600 sample recordings of Orthodox Tewahedo chants, traditional Azmari songs and contemporary Ethiopian secular music. Each sample is classified by five expert judges into one of four well-known Ethiopian Kiñits, Tizita, Bati, Ambassel and Anchihoye. Each Kiñit uses its own pentatonic scale and also has its own stylistic characteristics. Thus, Kiñit classification needs to combine scale identification with genre recognition. After describing the dataset, we present the Ethio Kiñits Model (EKM), based on VGG, for classifying the EMIR clips. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether Filterbank, Mel-spectrogram, Chroma, or Mel-frequency Cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features work best for Kiñit classification using EKM. MFCC was found to be superior and was therefore adopted for Experiment 2, where the performance of EKM models using MFCC was compared using three different audio sample lengths. 3s length gave the best results. In Experiment 3, EKM and four existing models were compared on the EMIR dataset: AlexNet, ResNet50, VGG16 and LSTM. EKM was found to have the best accuracy (95.00%) as well as the fastest training time. However, the performance of VGG16 (93.00%) was found not to be significantly worse (P < 0.01). We hope this work will encourage others to explore Ethiopian music and to experiment with other models for Kiñit classification.

In this paper we present the Amharic Speech Emotion Dataset (ASED), which covers four dialects (Gojjam, Wollo, Shewa and Gonder) and five different emotions (neutral, fearful, happy, sad and angry). We believe it is the first Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) dataset for the Amharic language. 65 volunteer participants, all native speakers of Amharic, recorded 2,474 sound samples, two to four seconds in length. Eight judges (two for each dialect) assigned emotions to the samples with high agreement level (Fleiss kappa = 0.8). The resulting dataset is freely available for download. Next, we developed a four-layer variant of the well-known VGG model which we call VGGb. Three experiments were then carried out using VGGb for SER, using ASED. First, we investigated which features work best for Amharic, FilterBank, Mel Spectrogram, or Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC). This was done by training three VGGb SER models on ASED, using FilterBank, Mel Spectrogram and MFCC features respectively. Four forms of training were tried, standard cross-validation, and three variants based on sentences, dialects and speaker groups. Thus, a sentence used for training would not be used for testing, and the same for a dialect and speaker group. MFCC features were superior under all four training schemes. MFCC was therefore adopted for Experiment 2, where VGGb and three well-known existing models were compared on ASED: RESNet50, AlexNet and LSTM. VGGb was found to have very good accuracy (90.73%) as well as the fastest training time. In Experiment 3, the performance of VGGb was compared when trained on two existing SER datasets – RAVDESS (English) and EMO-DB (German) – as well as on ASED (Amharic). Results are comparable across these languages, with ASED being the highest. This suggests that VGGb can be successfully applied to other languages. We hope that ASED will encourage researchers to explore the Amharic language and to experiment with other models for Amharic SER.

No abstract

Arabic sentiment analysis has become an important research field in recent years. Initially, work focused on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the most widely-used form. Since then, work has been carried out on several different dialects, including Egyptian, Levantine and Moroccan. Moreover, a number of datasets have been created to support such work. However, up until now, less work has been carried out on Sudanese Arabic, a dialect which has 32 million speakers. In this paper, two new publicly available datasets are introduced, the 2-Class Sudanese Sentiment Dataset (SudSenti2) and the 3-Class Sudanese Sentiment Dataset (SudSenti3). Furthermore, a CNN architecture, SCM, is proposed, comprising five CNN layers together with a novel pooling layer, MMA, to extract the best features. This SCM+MMA model is applied to SudSenti2 and SudSenti3 with accuracies of 92.75% and 84.39%. Next, the model is compared to other deep learning classifiers and shown to be superior on these new datasets. Finally, the proposed model is applied to the existing Saudi Sentiment Dataset and to the MSA Hotel Arabic Review Dataset with accuracies 85.55% and 90.01%.

No abstract

No abstract