a b s t r a c tArabic is recognised as the 4th most used language of the Internet. Arabic has three main varieties: (1) classical Arabic (CA), (2) Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), (3) Arabic Dialect (AD). MSA and AD could be written either in Arabic or in Roman script (Arabizi), which corresponds to Arabic written with Latin letters, numerals and punctuation. Due to the complexity of this language and the number of corresponding challenges for NLP, many surveys have been conducted, in order to synthesise the work done on Arabic. However these surveys principally focus on two varieties of Arabic (MSA and AD, written in Arabic letters only), they are slightly old (no such survey since 2015) and therefore do not cover recent resources and tools. To bridge the gap, we propose a survey focusing on 90 recent research papers (74% of which were published after 2015). Our study presents and classifies the work done on the three varieties of Arabic, by concentrating on both Arabic and Arabizi, and associates each work to its publicly available resources whenever available.

Data annotation is an important but time-consuming and costly procedure. To sort a text into two classes, the very first thing we need is a good annotation guideline, establishing what is required to qualify for each class. In the literature, the difficulties associated with an appropriate data annotation has been underestimated. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically construct an annotated sentiment corpus for Algerian dialect (A Maghrebi Arabic dialect). The construction of this corpus is based on an Algerian sentiment lexicon that is also constructed automatically. The presented work deals with the two widely used scripts on Arabic social media: Arabic and Arabizi. The proposed approach automatically constructs a sentiment corpus containing 8000 messages (where 4000 are dedicated to Arabic and 4000 to Arabizi). The achieved F1-score is up to 72% and 78% for an Arabic and Arabizi test sets, respectively. Ongoing work is aimed at integrating transliteration process for Arabizi messages to further improve the obtained results.

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.

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