Enhancing Arabic Sentiment Analysis of Consumer Reviews: Machine Learning and Deep Learning Methods Based on NLP

Hani Almaqtari, Feng Zeng, Ammar Mohammed

Sentiment analysis utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to extract opinions from text, which is critical for businesses looking to refine strategies and better understand customer feedback. Understanding people’s sentiments about products through emotional tone analysis is paramount. However, analyzing sentiment in Arabic and its dialects poses challenges due to the language’s intricate morphology, right-to-left script, and nuanced emotional expressions. To address this, this study introduces the Arb-MCNN-Bi Model, which integrates the strengths of the transformer-based AraBERT (Arabic Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model with a Multi-channel Convolutional Neural Network (MCNN) and a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) for Arabic sentiment analysis. AraBERT, designed specifically for Arabic, captures rich contextual information through word embeddings. These embeddings are processed by the MCNN to enhance feature extraction and by the BiGRU to retain long-term dependencies. The final output is obtained through feedforward neural networks. The study compares the proposed model with various machine learning and deep learning methods, applying advanced NLP techniques such as Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), n-gram, Word2Vec (Skip-gram), and fastText (Skip-gram). Experiments are conducted on three Arabic datasets: the Arabic Customer Reviews Dataset (ACRD), Large-scale Arabic Book Reviews (LABR), and the Hotel Arabic Reviews dataset (HARD). The Arb-MCNN-Bi model with AraBERT achieved accuracies of 96.92%, 96.68%, and 92.93% on the ACRD, HARD, and LABR datasets, respectively. These results demonstrate the model’s effectiveness in analyzing Arabic text data and outperforming traditional approaches.