An Experimental Study on Sentiment Classification of Moroccan dialect texts in the web

With the rapid growth of the use of social media websites, obtaining the users' feedback automatically became a crucial task to evaluate their tendencies and behaviors online. Despite this great availability of information, and the increasing number of Arabic users only few research has managed to treat Arabic dialects. The purpose of this paper is to study the opinion and emotion expressed in real Moroccan texts precisely in the YouTube comments using some well-known and commonly used methods for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we present our work of Moroccan dialect comments classification using Machine Learning (ML) models and based on our collected and manually annotated YouTube Moroccan dialect dataset. By employing many text preprocessing and data representation techniques we aim to compare our classification results utilizing the most commonly used supervised classifiers: k-nearest neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), and deep learning (DL) classifiers such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LTSM). Experiments were performed using both raw and preprocessed data to show the importance of the preprocessing. In fact, the experimental results prove that DL models have a better performance for Moroccan Dialect than classical approaches and we achieved an accuracy of 90%.