Exploring Emoji Sentiment Roles in Arabic Textual Content on Digital Social Networks

Abstract

In today’s digital landscape, emoji have risen as pivotal elements in articulating sentiment, especially within the intricacies of the Arabic language. This thesis examines the various roles that emoji can play in expressing sentiment in Arabic texts, highlighting their relevance both in academic and real-world contexts. Beginning with foundational insights, our investigation retraces the history of emoji as important non-verbal communicative tools in human interaction. Then, we explore the distinct challenges of sentiment analysis in Arabic and refer to a thorough review of previous studies to frame our method, identifying both established techniques and unexplored opportunities. At the heart of our research is the understanding that, depending on the context, an emoji can adopt a wide variety of sentiment roles. These range from acting as an indicator, mitigator, emphasizer, reverser, releaser, or trigger of either negative or positive sentiment. Additionally, there are instances where an emoji simply maintains a neutral effect on the sentiment of the accompanying text. To achieve this, we gathered a large dataset, mainly from Twitter, and developed lexicons of words and emoji tailored for sentiment analysis in Arabic. These lexicons were the basis of our analysis model. By leveraging the insights gained from the emoji-roles sentiment lexicon and combining them with our established knowledge of the sentiment roles associated with specific emoji patterns, we make a significant improvement in the conventional sentiment classifier based on the emoji lexicon. Traditional methods often assign a static sentiment score to an emoji, failing to consider its varying roles in different textual contexts. Our refined approach corrects this oversight. Instead of considering a singular unchanging sentiment score for each emoji, the classifier dynamically retrieves sentiment scores based on the specific role the emoji plays within a given sentence. In conclusion, we compare our method with other Arabic sentiment analysis tools, demonstrating the value of our approach, especially within nuanced linguistic phenomena such as sarcasm and humour. This thesis sets the foundation for future Arabic research in this expanding domain.