A Comparative Analysis of Word Embedding and Deep Learning for Arabic Sentiment Classification

Sentiment analysis on social media platforms (i.e., Twitter or Facebook) has become an important tool to learn about users’ opinions and preferences. However, the accuracy of sentiment analysis is disrupted by the challenges of natural language processing (NLP). Recently, deep learning models have proved superior performance over statistical- and lexical-based approaches in NLP-related tasks. Word embedding is an important layer of deep learning models to generate input features. Many word embedding models have been presented for text representation of both classic and context-based word embeddings. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis to evaluate both classic and contextualized word embeddings for sentiment analysis. The four most frequently used word embedding techniques were used in their trained and pre-trained versions. The selected embedding represents classical and contextualized techniques. Classical word embedding includes algorithms such as GloVe, Word2vec, and FastText. By contrast, ARBERT is used as a contextualized embedding model. Since word embedding is more typically employed as the input layer in deep networks, we used deep learning architectures BiLSTM and CNN for sentiment classification. To achieve these goals, the experiments were applied to a series of benchmark datasets: HARD, Khooli, AJGT, ArSAS, and ASTD. Finally, a comparative analysis was conducted on the results obtained for the experimented models. Our outcomes indicate that, generally, generated embedding by one technique achieves higher performance than its pretrained version for the same technique by around 0.28 to 1.8% accuracy, 0.33 to 2.17% precision, and 0.44 to 2% recall. Moreover, the contextualized transformer-based embedding model BERT achieved the highest performance in its pretrained and trained versions. Additionally, the results indicate that BiLSTM outperforms CNN by approximately 2% in 3 datasets, HARD, Khooli, and ArSAS, while CNN achieved around 2% higher performance in the smaller datasets, AJGT and ASTD.