An Effective Text Classifier using Machine Learning for Identifying Tweets’ Polarity Concerning Terrorist Connotation

Abstract

Terrorist groups in the Arab world are using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to rapidly spread terror for the past few years. Detection and suspension of such accounts is a way to control the menace to some extent. This research is aimed at building an effective text classifier, using machine learning to identify the polarity of the tweets automatically. Five classifiers were chosen, which are AdB_SAMME, AdB_SAMME.R, Linear SVM, NB, and LR. These classifiers were applied on three features namely S1 (one word, unigram), S2 (word pair, bigram), and S3 (word triplet, trigram). All five classifiers evaluated samples S1, S2, and S3 in 346 preprocessed tweets. Feature extraction process utilized one of the most widely applied weighing schemes tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency).The results were validated by four experts in Arabic language (three teachers and an educational supervisor in Saudi Arabia) through a questionnaire. The study found that the Linear SVM classifier yielded the best results of 99.7 % classification accuracy on S3 among all the other classifiers used. When both classification accuracy and time were considered, the NB classifier demonstrated the performance on S1 with 99.4% accuracy, which was comparable with Linear SVM. The Arab world has faced massive terrorist attacks in the past, and therefore, the research is highly significant and relevant due to its specific focus on detecting terrorism messages in Arabic. The state-of-the-art methods developed so far for tweets classification are mostly focused on analyzing English text, and hence, there was a dire need for devising machine learning algorithms for detecting Arabic terrorism messages. The innovative aspect of the model presented in the current study is that the five best classifiers were selected and applied on three language models S1, S2, and S3. The comparative analysis based on classification accuracy and time constraints proposed the best classifiers for sentiment analysis in the Arabic language.