MASHAEIR: Bootstrapping a Multi-Dialect Fine- Grained Emotion Thesaurus for Arabic Using Twitter | ||||
| The Egyptian Journal of Language Engineering | ||||
| Article 2, Volume 2, Issue 2, September 2015, Page 10-21 PDF (891.54 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/ejle.2015.60192 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
Khaled Elghamry 
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| Faculty of Alsun, Ain Shams University | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| The user-generated content on social media sites, e.g. Twitter and Facebook, provides a rich source of people's emotions towards products, issues, people and major events. Accordingly, the focus of more research has moved from negative-positive sentiment classification tasks to tasks of recognizing more fine-grained emotions. However, research on and resources for fine-grained emotion identification in Arabic texts are still lacking. To fill in this gap, this paper introduces MASHAEIR (an Arabic word that means ‘emotions’), a corpus-based multi-dialect fine-grained emotion thesaurus for Arabic. MASHAEIR was bootstrapped using 'big data' from Arabic Twitter from January 2007 to July 2015. The thesaurus is enriched with (i) different types of single- as well as multi-word terms expressing emotions, (ii) Arabic dialectal variations in the expression of emotions and (iii) scores that reflect the intensity of the emotions conveyed through these units. The paper also presents a simple evaluation of the thesaurus coverage on a sample Twitter corpus. MASHAEIR is intended to present an outline of a large-scale and easy-to-update emotion thesaurus for Arabic that could also be enriched in the future with more information such as gender and age preferences in expressing emotions. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Arabic Sentiment Analysis; Emotion Thesaurus; social media | ||||
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