Modeling Arabic subjectivity and sentiment in lexical space

Abstract In spite of the vast amount of work on subjectivity and sentiment analysis (SSA), it is not yet particularly clear how lexical information can best be modeled in a morphologically-richness language. To bridge this gap, we report successful models targeting lexical input in Arabic, a language of very complex morphology. Namely, we measure the impact of both gold and automatic segmentation on the task and build effective models achieving significantly higher than our baselines. Our models exploiting predicted segments improve subjectivity classification by 6.02% F1-measure and sentiment classification by 4.50% F1-measure against the majority class baseline surface word forms. We also perform in-depth (error) analyses of the behavior of the models and provide detailed explanations of subjectivity and sentiment expression in Arabic against the morphological richness background in which the work is situated.