Due to the significant use of Arabic language in social media networks, the demand for Arabic sentiment analysis has increased rapidly. Although, numerous sentiment analysis techniques enable people to obtain valuable insights from the opinions shared on social media. However, these techniques are still in their infancy, and the Arabic sentiment analysis domain lacks a compressive survey. Therefore, this study focused on the various characteristics, State-of-the-Art, and the level of sentiment analysis along with the natural language processing applied in the Arabic sentiment analysis. Furthermore, this study also discussed the sentiment analysis of the modern standards and the dialects of Arabic languages along with various machine learning processes and a few popular algorithms. Moreover, this study adds values by critical analysis of two case studies, which displayed an extensive set of the various research communities in this field of sentiment analysis. Finally, open research challenges are investigated, with a focus on the shortage of lexicons; availability; use of Dialect Arabic (DA); lack of corpora and datasets; right to left reading and compound phrases and idioms.

A sentiment analysis of Arabic texts is an important task in many commercial applications such as Twitter. This study introduces a multi-criteria method to empirically assess and rank classifiers for Arabic sentiment analysis. Prominent machine learning algorithms were deployed to build classification models for Arabic sentiment analysis classifiers. Moreover, an assessment of the top five machine learning classifiers’ performances measures was discussed to rank the performance of the classifier. We integrated the top five ranking methods with evaluation metrics of machine learning classifiers such as accuracy, recall, precision, F-measure, CPU Time, classification error, and area under the curve (AUC). The method was tested using Saudi Arabic product reviews to compare five popular classifiers. Our results suggest that deep learning and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers perform best with accuracy 85.25%, 82.30%; precision 85.30, 83.87%; recall 88.41%, 83.89; F-measure 86.81, 83.87%; classification error 14.75, 17.70; and AUC 0.93, 0.90, respectively. They outperform decision trees, K-nearest neighbours (K-NN), and Naïve Bayes classifiers.

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Forecasting disease outbreaks in real-time using time-series data can help for the planning of public health interventions. We used a support vector machine (SVM) model using epidemiological data provided by Johns Hopkins University Centre for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CCSE), World Health Organization (WHO), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to predict upcoming records before the WHO made an official declaration. Our study, conducted on the time series data available from 22 January till 10 March 2020, revealed that COVID-19 was spreading at an alarming rate and progressing towards a pandemic. The initial insight that confirmed COVID-19 cases were increasing was because these received the highest number of effects for our selected dataset from 22 January to 10 March 2020, i.e., 126,344 (64%). The recovered cases were 68289 (34%), and the death rate was around 2%. Moreover, we classified the tweets from 22 January to 15 April 2020 into positive and negative sentiments to identify the emotions (stress or relaxed) posted by Twitter users related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis identified that tweets mostly conveyed a negative sentiment with a high frequency of words for #coronavirus and #lockdown amid COVID-19. However, these anxiety tweets are an alarm for healthcare authorities to devise plans accordingly.