Sentiment Analysis for Emiriti Dialects in Twitter

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is not a new field of study and in research there has been a focus on word polarity to distinguish between positive, negative, or neutral sentiments of words. However, the Emirati Dialect (and by extension the Arabian Gulf dialects) had received little attention. This paper aims to provide a feasibility study of the possibility of assigning a sentiment value to a word when it comes to the UAE's Arabic Dialect (Emirati). In this study, ten keyword phrases were selected from the Emirati Dialect and were examined to assign their polarity from Twitter collections. During the course of this study and based on the statistical results of the examination of the test sets, it became apparent that it was indeed possible to assign a sentiment value to certain Emirati words.