An Improved Arabic Sentiment Analysis Approach using Optimized Multinomial Nave Bayes Classifier

sentiment analysis has emerged during the last decade as a computational process on Arabic texts for extracting people's attitudes toward targeted objects or their feelings and emotions regarding targeted events. Sentiment analysis (SA) using machine learning (ML) methods has become an important research task for developing various text-based applications. Among different ML classifiers, multinomial Naive Bayes (MNNB) classifier is widely used for documents classification due to its ability for performing statistical analysis of text contents. It significantly simplifies textual-data classification and offers an alternative to heavy ML-based semantic analysis methods. However, the MNNB classifier has a number of hyper-parameters affects the classification task of texts and controls the decision boundary of the model itself. In this paper, an optimized MNNB classifier-based approach is proposed for improving Arabic sentiment analysis. A number of experiments are conducted on large sets of Arabic tweets to evaluate the proposed approach. The optimized MNNB classifier is trained on three datasets and tested on a different separated test set to show the performance of developed approach. The experimental results on the test set revealed that the optimized MNNB classifier of proposed approach outperforms the traditional MNNB classifier and other baseline classifiers. The accuracy rate of the optimization approach is increased by 1.6% compared with using the default values of the classifier's hyper-parameters.