Rule-Based Arabic Sentiment Analysis using Binary Equilibrium Optimization Algorithm

With the development of websites and social networks, Internet users generate a massive amount of comments and information on the Web. Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, offers an opportunity to mine the people’s sentiments and emotions from the textual comments. In the last decade, sentiment analysis has been applied in research areas such as recommendation and support systems and has become an area of interest for many researchers. Therefore, many studies have been carried out on English, while other languages, such as Arabic, received less attention. Increasingly, sentiment analysis researchers use machine learning due to its excellent performance. However, the generated models are black boxes and non-interpretable by the users. The rule-based classification is a promising approach for generating interpretable models. This work proposes a classification rule-based Arabic sentiment analysis approach together with a new binary equilibrium optimization metaheuristic algorithm as an optimization method for classification rule generation from Arabic documents. The proposed approach has been experimented on the Opinion Corpus for Arabic (OCA) and generates a classification model of thirteen rules. The comparison results with state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed approach outperforms all other white-box models regarding classification accuracy.