This work explores the application of Sentiment Analysis to the Arabic language, and especially in the context of social media. The aim is to push the state-of-the-art in that field, and build a system that performs social media analytics on Arabic social data streams.

The first step was the collection of the LABR dataset, which contains over 60K book reviews in Arabic.

• Mohamed Aly and Amir Atiya. LABR: Large Scale Arabic Book Reviews Dataset. Meetings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013. [pdf]
• LABR: Large Scale Arabic Book Reviews Dataset