Asmaa Hashem Sweidan

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a vast corpus of online conversations regarding vaccines, predominantly on social media platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter). However, analyzing sentiment in Arabic text is challenging due to the diverse dialects and lack of readily available sentiment analysis resources for the Arabic language. This paper proposes an explainable Deep Learning (DL) approach designed for sentiment analysis of Arabic tweets related to COVID-19 vaccinations. The proposed approach utilizes a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network with Multi-Self-Attention (MSA) mechanism for capturing contextual impacts over long spans within the tweets, while having the sequential nature of Arabic text constructively learned by the BiLSTM model. Moreover, the XLNet embeddings are utilized to feed contextual information into the model. Subsequently, two essential Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods, namely Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), have been employed for gaining further insights into the features’ contributions to the overall model performance and accordingly achieving reasonable interpretation of the model’s output. Obtained experimental results indicate that the combined XLNet with BiLSTM model outperforms other implemented state-of-the-art methods, achieving an accuracy of 93.2% and an F-measure of 92% for average sentiment classification. The integration of LIME and SHAP techniques not only enhanced the model’s interpretability, but also provided detailed insights into the factors that influence the classification of emotions. These findings underscore the model’s effectiveness and reliability for sentiment analysis in low-resource languages such as Arabic.

This paper proposes an approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis of Arabic social data, especially the considerable text corpus generated through communications on X (formerly known as Twitter) for expressing opinions in Arabic-language tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed approach examines the performance of several pre-trained predictive and autoregressive language models; namely, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and XLNet, along with topic modeling algorithms; namely, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), for aspect-based sentiment analysis of online Arabic text. In addition, Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) deep learning model is used to classify the extracted aspects from online reviews. Obtained experimental results indicate that the combined XLNet-NMF model outperforms other implemented state-of-the-art methods through improving the feature extraction of unstructured social media text with achieving values of 0.946 and 0.938, for average sentiment classification accuracy and F-measure, respectively.

This paper presents a hybrid ontology-XLNet sentiment analysis classification approach for sentence-level aspects. The main objective of the proposed approach allows discovering user social data considering the extracted in-depth inference about sentiment depending on the context. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the contribution of utilizing the lexicalized ontology to improve the aspect-based sentiment analysis performance through extracting the indirect relationships in user social data. The XLNet model is utilized for extracting the neighboring contextual meaning and concatenating it with each embeddings word to produce a more comprehensive context and enhance feature extraction. In the proposed approach, Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) networks are used for classifying the aspects in online user reviews. Various experiments considering Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) discovery are conducted on six drug-related social data real-world datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach using several measures. Obtained experimental results show that the proposed approach outperformed other tested state-of-the-art related approaches through improving feature extraction of unstructured social media text and accordingly improving the overall accuracy of sentiment classification. A significant accuracy of 98% and F-measure of 96.4% are achieved by the proposed ADRs aspect-based sentiment analysis approach.