Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Computers and Information - Department of Computer Science

Sentiment analysis has recently become one of the growing areas of research related to text mining and natural language processing. The increasing availability of online resources and popularity of rich and fast resources for opinion sharing like news, online review sites and personal blogs, caused several parties such as customers, companies, and governments to start analyzing and exploring these opinions. Most of the current studies related to this topic focus mainly on English texts with very limited resources available for other languages like Arabic. The challenge of sentiment analysis and text mining in general in Arabic arises from the complexity of the language in terms of both structure and morphology. The Arabic language allows for different variants within each type of sentence. Many different parts of speech, particular about Arabic, are possible. Furthermore, Arabic is a highly inflectional and derivational language with many word forms and diacritics

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