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Sentiment analysis for moroccan dialect

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 Sentiment Analysis for Moroccan Dialect
EL BERGUI ADAM
National school For Computer Science.
ENSIAS
adam.elbergui@um5s.net.ma

Abstract— Given the importance of Sentiment Analysis, many

research works have been devoted to this research area. How-
ever, most of these studies have focused on English and other
Indo-European languages.The studies that are conducting to
investigate Arabic text mining and natural language processing
for Arabic text are not compatible with the wide use of Arabic
language in social media due to its complexity and the absence
of free lexical resources regarding the Arabic language . The
studies become fewer when it comes to Dialectal Arabic due
to its many challenges . To overcome this challenges we aim to
explore sentiment classification for Moroccan Dialect language,
we propose in this work to conduct a supervised approach
on two different datasets of Moroccan Dialect reviews. This
approach involves four consecutive tasks : Data collection,text
pre-processing, feature extraction, and sentiment classification.

Fig. 1. Arabic language types

I. INTRODUCTION
With the rapid development of network and information
technology, the applications in form of rich media have
involved in all aspects of our lives. Accordingly, the interac-
tion and communication between individuals have become
more and more convenient and frequent by sharing their
views about different topics through social networks such
as Twitter, Facebook or they leave comments and reviews
regarding products on a particular websites which creates a
need for mining such data . Sentiment analysis has become
a key tool for making sense of that data. This has allowed
companies to get key insights and automate all kind of
processes. Sentiments are very important whenever we need
to make a decision we need to know others sentiment.
This is not only true for individuals, but it is also true for
organizations and governments.
Sentiment Analysis examines the problem of studying texts,
like posts and reviews, uploaded by users on forums, and
electronic businesses, regarding the opinions they have about
a product, service, event, person or idea. Existing research
has produced numerous techniques for various tasks of
sentiment analysis, which include both supervised and un-
supervised methods. In the supervised setting, early papers
used all types of supervised machine learning methods
(Support Vector Machines (SVM), Maximum Entropy, Naïve
Bayes, etc.) and feature combinations. Unsupervised methods
include various methods that exploit sentiment lexicons,
grammatical analysis, and syntactic patterns.
Arabic is one of the six official languages of the United
Nations. It is the official language of 27 countries and
is spoken by more than 422 million people in the Arab
world. On the web, Arabic is ranked the fourth mostly used
language and the fastest growing during the last five years
with a growth rate of 6091.9% in the number of Internet users
[1] . Arabic Language belongs to the Semitic languages and
it can be classified into three general types [2] :
• Classical Arabic : CA is identified as the language
of the holy Qur’an . It is accorded an elevated status
throughout the Muslim world as it is essential for
understanding the Qur’an.
• Modern Standard Arabic : MSA is an artificial
language in that it is no one native language. It is
commonly used for formal, literary, and educational
purposes across the Arabic speaking countries.
• Dialectal Arabic : DA used in informal communication
throughout the Arabic world. These language varieties
not only show considerable variation from one country
to another, but also differ from one region to another
within the same county.Arabic dialectal varieties are
generally classified into five groups [3] .
II. C HALLENGES O F A RABIC SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
Arabic is an important language for its historical, cultural
and social aspects.However ,Arabic did not receive much
attention until recently, but it still lacks behind due to its
many challenges . These challenges have some similarities
across different languages but there are many issues and
problems that are specific to Arabic language .
• Data gathering is challenging for the Arabic language,
due to the limited sources available to collect it .
• Social Media sites often contain misspelled words and
transliterated

Fig. 2. Geolinguistic classification of the Arabic dialects [2]
• Arabiziis a new trend in social media where Arabic
words represented by Latin letters . Additionally, some
Arabic users tend to switch between Arabic and English,
making it difficult to detect if a word is written is
Arabizi or English [5] . Dealing with this form of
writing has been the subject solely of studies that aim
at detecting and converting Arabizi into Arabic [5].
• Idioms are commonly used in Arabic text in social
media. These idioms could vary from one dialect to
another and may have a reversed meaning in different
regions of the Arab world which creates a challenge in
Sentiment Analysis systems.
• Sarcasm detection is a general issue in sentiment anal-
ysis due to its effect in misleading the classification.
Detecting sarcasm is a hard process and limited research
has been conducted on this issue. Sarcasm has not been
yet explored in the Arabic language .
Dialectal Arabic shares many challenges with MSA, as DA
inherits the same characteristics of being a Semitic language
with a complex templatic derivational morphology .In addi-
tion to the shared challenges, DA has its own peculiarities,
which can be summarized as follows :
• Lack of standard orthography. Many of the words in
DA do not follow a standard orthographic system [3].
• Many words do not overlap with MSA as a result
of language borrowing from other languages , for ex-
ample a sentence in a Moroccan dialect may contain
words derived from standard arabic, Amazigh dialect
“Tamazight”,French, Spanish, and English.
• The regular discourse features in informal texts, such
as the use of emoticons and character repetition for
emphasis .
• Code-switching is common phenomenon in multilingual
communities where speakers switch from one language
or dialect to another within the same context . Code-
switching is very common in Arabic dialects .
III. R ELATED W ORKS
A considerable amount of previous works have been
published on sentiment analysis. These studies mostly re-
port analysis of sentiments in messages in English. Fewer
studies were done on sentiments in Arabic language .The
available Arabic datasets and lexicons for sentiment analysis
are still limited in size, availability and dialects coverage.
For instance, the highest proportion of available resources
and researches are devoted to Modern Standard Aarabic.
The objective of the present section is to review the most
important research studies that have dealt with Sentiment
Analysis in dialectal Arabic.
A Sentiment Analyses for Tunisian Social Network Texts
was devloped [7] . They collected 260 Statues, posted by
Tunisian .They used SVM and NB as classifiers , for features
extraction they used unigrams, bigrams, trigrams and parts of
speech . they showed that the accuracy is high when using the
bigram as a feature. SVM’s (83.16% accuracy) outperformed
the NB(81.14% accuracy ) when unigrams is used.
An opinion mining system called Ara’a was proposed by
Azmi and Alzanin [8]. It targets the Saudi Najdi Dialect. The
dataset used was a collection of 815 comments on online
news articles that were manually annotated using four polar-
ities : strongly positive, positive, negative, strongly negative.
All the words in the dataset were removed except those
with explicit connotations. A vocabulary was constructed
containing all the distinct keywords from the training set.
An NB classifier was used along with a revised n-gram for
words not found in the vocabulary. The classifier reached an
accuracy of 82%.
Through the study of relative work done in recent years
in Arabic sentiment analysis domain we can say that this
is a vast domain where a range of techniques available
for classification sentiment for data from social media and
still there are a lot of ongoing research. The accuracy and
complexity of methods depends on the dataset and the
number of dataset features.
IV. M ETHODOLOGY
In this chapter , we present our methodology used for the
task of classifying the sentence orientations. It precise our
text models, the used data set and the applied classifiers. We
detail also our pre-processing schemes and the normalization
techniques used to deal with the informal dialectal Arabic
language nature especially Moroccan Arabic ”Darija”. we
present Also the measurement techniques used to evaluate the
performance of sentiment classification. We can summarize
our methodology as follows : First, describing the data set
used in this work. Second, applying different pre-processing
stage (including normalisation , noise elimination, conversion
of the emotion icons into text and more) to the generated data
set which in turn leads the polarity classification performance
to increase.Third The techniques used for text representation
. Finally, classifying the Moroccan dialect text using machine
learning classifiers and compare the results.
A. Data Collection
We collected two different dataset , the first one is
balanced (number of positive comments equals to negative
ones ) and contains comments on different domains , the
second one is unbalanced and contains comments on only
one domain which is politics .
 The first dataset is collected by A.Oussous et al [6] from
internet discussion forums and blogs which are hosted in
Morocco or extensively used by Moroccans .The data set
is a combination of reviews and comments from Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube and Hespress . It is a multi-domain corpus
consisting of the text covering a maximum vocabulary from
sport, social and politics domain.The collected corpus, called
MSAC (Moroccan Sentiment Analysis Corpus).The final
MSAC dataset after cleaning contains about 1,014 of positive
reviews and 1,022 of negative ones written in Moroccan
dialect ”Darija”.
The second dataset is gathered from various social media
websites as Facebook , Twitter , YouTube and Hespress and
it is annotated manually .The dataset contains only comments
that related on politics espicially Moroccan general election
of 2016 written in Moroccan dialect ”Darija” . The dataset
is called ElecMorocco2016 and contains 3673 comments of
positive comments and 6581 of negative ones.
B. Data pre-processing
The pre-processing techniques are an essential step in
the SA for Arabic text. Especially the Arabic dialectal text
because of its unstructured form. Indeed, the posts and texts
generated by social media include informal writing, errors,
the use of abbreviations, missing punctuation, no respect
of grammatical rules. So, we need to process unstructured
text that lack grammar standardization. We have also to
eliminate spelling mistakes and noise. To minimize the
effect of those issues we decided to pre-process Arabic
posts before classification. To enhance the results of SA
for Arabic text, we created our own text pre-processing
scheme to deal with the informal Arabic language nature.
We describe below the different pre-processing tasks that
we implemented using the Python programming language.
Those tasks are normalization and tokenization, stop words
removal and lexicon developments.
• Noise Reduction by Removing all user-names
(e.g.@username), hash tags (e.g.topic), URLs
(e.g. www.example.com), re-tweet sign (e.g. RT),
punctuations , additional white spaces and non-Arabic
word and letters from the text.
• Replace the emojis encountered in the reviews with their
sentiment . To do so, we prepared a list for mapping
known emojis to their corresponding sentiment (positive
or negative ) . This way we do not lose the sentiment
expressed by those emojis.
• Tokenization by spliting texts into a sequence of tokens
based on whitespaces characters. This step allows us to
model a text as a word vector.
• Removing the repeated letters which might appear spe-
cially in social media which expresses affirmation and
accentuation.
• Remove Stop words , This step filters Arabic stop words
by removing every token equal to an item from the stop
word list.
• The process of stemming aims normalizing word vari-
ations by removing prefixes and suffixes and reducing
words to their original root. Two types of stemming
approaches can be cited :light stemming and root ex-
traction . The first transforms each term to its three-
letter root. The light stemming reduces each term by
removing its prefixes and suffixes without reducing
them to their roots. We investigated both types in this
research .
C. Features extraction
After the pre-processing task, texts (reviews) were repre-
sented as a vector .We used unigrams (bag of words) but we
also combined unigrams and bigrams to take in consideration
the order of words in the text during our experiments .To
get a numerical representation of the text data we used
two weighting schemes :TF_IDF(Term Frequency_Inverse
Document Frequency) , Term Occurence .
• The TF-IDF value increases uniformly to the number of
times a word (feature) occurs in the text, but is adjusted
by the frequency of the feature in the dataset, which
minimizes the weight of some words that appear more
frequently in general.
d = (w1 , ....., w|V | )
wi = tfi × log(D/dfi )
where tfi is the number of times the word wi occurs
in the text d ,dfi number of texts contain the word wi
and D is the total number of texts .
• The Term Occurence weighting count the occurence
of each term in the text .
d = (w1 , ....., w|V | )
where d is the text and |V | is the size of vocabulary
set in the dataset . wi represents how many the word
occurs in the text.
D. Classification Models
The performance of sentiment analysis is strongly de-
pendant on the applied classifier. Then depending on the
data-size various model validation techniques can be used.
Cross-validation is commonly used for sentiment analysis
evaluations. The annotated dataset is split into k equal parts,
then the first part is treated as the testing data and the rest as
training data, this selection process is repeated for each of
the parts. Each part is used exactly once as the testing data.
• Support Vector Machine is a machine learning method
based on vector spaces, where the goal is to find a
decision boundary between two classes that represents
the maximum margin of separation in the training data.
SVM can construct a non-linear decision surface in the
original feature space by mapping the data instances
non-linearly to an inner product space where the classes
can by separated linearly with a hyperplane.
• Naive Bayes classifier assumes conditional indepen-
dence to make the calculations easier ; that is, given
the class attribute value, other feature attributes become
 conditionally independent. This condition, though unre-
alistic, performs well in practice and greatly simplifies
calculation .
• Logistic regression uses the sigmoid function hw (x) =
T
f (x) = 1/(1 + e−w x ) as a learning model, then it
optimizes a cost function that measures the likelihood of
the data given the classifier’s class probability estimates
.
E. Evaluation
The efficiency of each classifier can be measured by calcu-
lating the Accuracy,Precision,F-Measure and Recall ,which
are defined as: Fig. 3. Results using light stemming and a combination of unigram and
• Accuracy : The most common metric for classification bigram on MSAC dataset
, which is the fraction of samples predicted correctly .
T rueP ositive + T rueN egative
Accuracy =
T otal
• Precision : The fraction of predicted positives events
that are actually positive.
T rueP ositive
P recision =
T rueP ositive + F alseP ositive
• Recall :Also known as sensitivity and represents the
fraction of positives samples predicted correctly.
T rueP ositive
Recall =
T rueP ositive + F alseN egative Fig. 4. Results using light stemming and a combination of unigram and
bigram on Election dataset
• F1-Score : The harmonic mean of precision and recall
.
P recision ∗ Recall
F 1 − Score = 2 ×
P recision + Recall best results are given by using Term Occurrence weighting,
V. RESULTS light-stemming and the combination of unigram and bi-gram,
In this section , we compare the performance of the it achieves 80.64% based on the accuracy measure. Finally,
machine learning classification methods (SVM,Naive Bayes, the best result achieved by Logistic regression classfier is
and Maximum Entropy) for each machine learning technique, 81.17% based on the accuracy measure, this result is given
different combinations of the preprocessing have been ap- by using TF-IDF, light stemming and uni-gram features.
plied . The obtained results for elections dataset shows that the
The obtained results for MSAC dataset shows that the best results based on the accuracy measure are given when
best result achieved by SVM Is 84.31% based on the using Logistic regression with TF-IDF, light stemming and
accuracy measure, this result is given when using TF-IDF unigrams model .We also notice that using light stemming
weighting,light stemming and the uni-gram model. For the yields the best performance regardless of the algorithm used.
NB classifier, the best results are given by using TF-IDF
VI. CONCLUSIONS
weighting, light-stemming and the combination of uni-gram
and bi-gram, it achieves 86.02% based on the accuracy mea- This project aimed at investigating the classification of
sure. Finally, the best result achieved by Logistic regression sentiments for Moroccan dialect. The first goal for this
classifier is 84.56% based on the accuracy measure, this project is to study the sentiment analysis workflow in details,
result is given by using TF-IDF, light stemming and uni- describing the most used approaches in this field and showing
gram features. The obtained results for MSAC dataset shows some related works for Arabic sentiment analysis. the second
that the best results based on the accuracy measure are goal is to take advantage of some settings to discover the
given when using Naive Bayes with TF-IDF, light stemming ones that lead to the highest results. The variables considered
and the combination of unigrams and bigram. We also were about the weighting of terms, the type of stemming and
notice that using light stemming and TF-IDF yields the best the n-gram word model. In order to compare these variables
performance regardless of the algorithm used. The obtained We used the three most popular classifiers recognized for
results for the elections dataset shows that the best result their effectiveness for the classification task, namely Naive
achieved by SVM Is 80.93% based on the accuracy measure, Bayes,Support Vector Machine and Logistic Regression. An-
this result is given when using TF-IDF weighting, light other goal of this project was to compare the effectiveness of
stemming and the uni-gram model. For the NB classifier, the these three classifiers in two different datsets for Moroccan
 dialect the first one is MSAC and it is about various topics
and the second one is about the 2016 elections of morocco.
VII. F UTURE W ORKS
Future work will involve investigation of other methods
in particular deep learning approaches. In order to use deep
learning approaches we would increase the amount of data
because deep learning models needs large datasets. We also
aim to investigate few shot learning, transfer learning and
data augmentation models for text .
R EFERENCES
[1] Sentiment analysis in Arabic : A review of the literature
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douane Chiheb ENSIAS, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Mo-
rocco the literature. Ain Shams Eng. J. (2017, in press). https
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[2] DIALECTAL ARABIC PROCESSING USING DEEP LEARNING
Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philoso-
phie (Dr. phil.) durch die Philosophische Fakultät der Heinrich-Heine-
Universität Düsseldorf.
[3] Habash, Nizar Y. (2010). “Introduction to Arabic natural language
processing.” In : Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies
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[4] Al-Twairesh N, Al-Khalifa H, Al-Salman A (2014) In : 2014 IEEE/
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[6] Improving Sentiment Analysis of Moroccan Tweets Using Ensemble
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(2018)
[7] Ghadeer, A.S., Aljarah, I. and Alsawalqah, H., 2017. Enhancing the
Arabic sentiment analysis using different preprocessing operators. New
Trends Inf. Technol, 113(April, 2017), pp.113-117
[8] S.R. El-Beltagy, A. Ali, Open issues in the sentiment analysis of
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