Ahmad A. Al Sallab, Ramy Baly, Gilbert Badaro, Hazem Hajj, Wassim El Hajj, Khaled Bashir Shaaban “Deep Learning models for sentiment analysis in Arabic”, Arabic NLP workshop, ACL-IJCNLP, The 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and The 7th International Joint Conference of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, Beijing, China, July 26-31, 2015

In this paper, deep learning framework is proposed for text sentiment classification in Arabic. Four different architectures are explored. Three are based on Deep Belief Networks and Deep Auto Encoders, where the input data model is based on the ordinary Bag-of-Words, with features based on the recently developed Arabic Sentiment Lexicon in combination with other standard lexicon features. The fourth model, based on the Recursive Auto Encoder, is proposed to tackle the lack of context handling in the first three models. The evaluation is carried out using Linguistic Data Consortium Arabic Tree Bank dataset, with benchmarking against the state of the art systems in sentiment classification with reported results on the same dataset. The results show high improvement of the fourth model over the state of the art, with the advantage of using no lexicon resources that are scarce and costly in terms of their development.