Arabic sentiment analysis is here.
Repustate has always had a mindset of not resting on our laurels. We’re constantly improving, always iterating, and in an endless pursuit of the best software solutions we can produce. Today is the culmination of our latest efforts: Arabic sentiment analysis.
Starting today, customers of our paid plans can analyze their Arabic social media data just as they can analyze English data. Parts of speech extraction and most importantly, sentiment, are now part of our blazingly fast API. For the impatient, head on over to our API demo and give it a whirl.
Arabic is much tougher cookie to crack than other languages. The biggest problem that one faces when dealing with Arabic text is the various forms a root word can take on given context, tense, and surrounding words. In the linguistics world, this is referred to as morphology. Quoting the University of Columbia’s Owen Rambow, “Arabic morphology is usually considered more complex than English morphology because it involves not only prefixes and suffixes (such as -ed or -ing in English), but also changes to the lexical root itself (perhaps somewhat like English sing, sang, sung, song, but more common).”
The number of combinations and permutations in Arabic dwarfs English and latin languages such as Spanish or Italian. Simply disambiguating the meaning of a word in Arabic is a task unto itself. But Repustate handles this PLUS extracting sentiment using advanced feature detection and extraction. All in sub-second times. Arabic NLP is no easy feat, and we’re very proud of our accomplishments.
Best of all, all of Repustate’s Arabic sentiment analysis is done natively, in Arabic, meaning there is no intermediate step of translating to English first. That means a higher degree of accuracy can be attained as possible sources of error are reduced.