Abstract
In response to the increasing influence of social media networks on shaping the public opinion, sentiment analysis systems and applications have been developed to extract insights and gain an overview of the wider public opinion behind certain topics so as to support businesses, manufacturers, government agencies, and policymakers with their decisions and plans. Despite the importance of sentiment analysis in providing policymakers with effective mechanisms to understand the attitudes of customers and citizens which can be usefully used in decision-making processes and planning for the future, so far studies on sentiment analysis are very limited in Egypt. Much of the work is still done using survey tools such as questionnaires and polls to gather information about the citizens' attitudes towards given issues and topics. Despite the effectiveness of such methods, citizens' reflections on social media platforms and networks remain more powerful in providing comprehensive insights and overviews. Furthermore, social media-based sentiment analysis is usually more representative being based on larger numbers of participants, which has positive implications to reliability. Opinions expressed on social media are often the most powerful forms of feedback for businesses because they are given unsolicited. In light of this argument, this study seeks to provide a sentiment analysis of Egypt's New Real Estate Registration Law on Facebook. To extract information about the users' sentiment polarity (positive, neutral or negative), Facebook posts were used. The rationale is that Facebook is still the most popular social media platform in Egypt. Text classification was then used for classifying the selected data into three main classes/values: Positive, Negative, and Neutral. The findings indicate that sentiments expressed in the users' posts and comments have a significant negative attitude towards the new law. Despite the effectiveness of the automatic evaluation and analysis of the sentiments and opinions of the users in social media concerning the new Real Estate Registration Law, linguistic approaches including Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), functional linguistics, and semiotics need to be incorporated into sentiment analysis applications for gaining a better understanding of people's attitudes towards specific issues.