Identifying Sentiments in Algerian Code-switched User-generated Comments

Wafia Adouane, Samia Touileb, Jean-Philippe Bernardy


Abstract
We present in this paper our work on Algerian language, an under-resourced North African colloquial Arabic variety, for which we built a comparably large corpus of more than 36,000 code-switched user-generated comments annotated for sentiments. We opted for this data domain because Algerian is a colloquial language with no existing freely available corpora. Moreover, we compiled sentiment lexicons of positive and negative unigrams and bigrams reflecting the code-switches present in the language. We compare the performance of four models on the task of identifying sentiments, and the results indicate that a CNN model trained end-to-end fits better our unedited code-switched and unbalanced data across the predefined sentiment classes. Additionally, injecting the lexicons as background knowledge to the model boosts its performance on the minority class with a gain of 10.54 points on the F-score. The results of our experiments can be used as a baseline for future research for Algerian sentiment analysis.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.328
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2698–2705
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.328
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wafia Adouane, Samia Touileb, and Jean-Philippe Bernardy. 2020. Identifying Sentiments in Algerian Code-switched User-generated Comments. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2698–2705, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Sentiments in Algerian Code-switched User-generated Comments (Adouane et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/2020.lrec-1.328.pdf