@inproceedings{baly-etal-2017-characterization,
    title = "A Characterization Study of {A}rabic {T}witter Data with a Benchmarking for State-of-the-Art Opinion Mining Models",
    author = "Baly, Ramy  and
      Badaro, Gilbert  and
      El-Khoury, Georges  and
      Moukalled, Rawan  and
      Aoun, Rita  and
      Hajj, Hazem  and
      El-Hajj, Wassim  and
      Habash, Nizar  and
      Shaban, Khaled",
    editor = "Habash, Nizar  and
      Diab, Mona  and
      Darwish, Kareem  and
      El-Hajj, Wassim  and
      Al-Khalifa, Hend  and
      Bouamor, Houda  and
      Tomeh, Nadi  and
      El-Haj, Mahmoud  and
      Zaghouani, Wajdi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Third {A}rabic Natural Language Processing Workshop",
    month = apr,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Valencia, Spain",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/W17-1314",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W17-1314",
    pages = "110--118",
    abstract = "Opinion mining in Arabic is a challenging task given the rich morphology of the language. The task becomes more challenging when it is applied to Twitter data, which contains additional sources of noise, such as the use of unstandardized dialectal variations, the nonconformation to grammatical rules, the use of Arabizi and code-switching, and the use of non-text objects such as images and URLs to express opinion. In this paper, we perform an analytical study to observe how such linguistic phenomena vary across different Arab regions. This study of Arabic Twitter characterization aims at providing better understanding of Arabic Tweets, and fostering advanced research on the topic. Furthermore, we explore the performance of the two schools of machine learning on Arabic Twitter, namely the feature engineering approach and the deep learning approach. We consider models that have achieved state-of-the-art performance for opinion mining in English. Results highlight the advantages of using deep learning-based models, and confirm the importance of using morphological abstractions to address Arabic{'}s complex morphology.",
}