Studying the Impression of Saudi People towards Current Social Changes

Abstract

In this work-in-progress paper, we examine how the campaign to end the guardianship law in Saudi Arabia is being discussed and debated on social media. Through a content analysis of tweets, we first identify those with either a positive or negative sentiment towards ending the law and then we identify topical themes across these sentiment categories. We found polarizing responses with individuals either calling for the end of the law or those opposing its end on religious or moral grounds. This analysis provides a basis for building a model to automatically code tweets to increase the accuracy of Arabic text prediction. This will allow us to answer new questions about the dataset and inform the design of ICTs.