Arabizi is a form of writing Arabic text which relies on Latin letters, numerals and punctuation rather than Arabic letters. In the literature, the difficulties associated with Arabizi sentiment analysis have been underestimated, principally due to the complexity of Arabizi. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically classify sentiments of Arabizi messages into positives or negatives. In the proposed approach, Arabizi messages are first transliterated into Arabic. Afterwards, we automatically classify the sentiment of the transliterated corpus using an automatically annotated corpus. For corpus validation, shallow machine learning algorithms such as Support Vectors Machine (SVM) and Naive Bays (NB) are used. Simulations results demonstrate the outperformance of NB algorithm over all others. The highest achieved F1-score is up to 78% and 76% for manually and automatically transliterated dataset respectively. Ongoing work is aimed at improving the transliterator module and annotated sentiment dataset.

Thanks to the advent of Web 2.0, the potential for opinion sharing today is unmatched in history. Making meaning out of the huge amount of unstructured information available online, however, is extremely difficult as web-contents, despite being perfectly suitable for human consumption, still remain hardly accessible to machines. To bridge the cognitive and affective gap between word-level natural language data and the concept-level sentiments conveyed by them, affective common sense knowledge is needed. In sentic computing, the general common sense knowledge contained in ConceptNet is usually exploited to spread affective information from selected affect seeds to other concepts. In this work, besides exploiting the emotional content of the Open Mind corpus, we also collect new affective common sense knowledge through label sequential rules, crowd sourcing, and games-with-a-purpose techniques. In particular, we develop Open Mind Common Sentics, an emotion-sensitive IUI that serves both as a platform for affective common sense acquisition and as a publicly available NLP tool for extracting the cognitive and affective information associated with short texts.