Abstract
The expansion of the world wide web has led to a huge amount of user generated content over different forums and social media platforms, these rich data resources offer the opportunity to reflect, and track changing public sentiments and help to develop proactive reactions strategies for decision and policy makers. Analysis of public emotions and opinions towards events and sentimental trends can help to address unforeseen areas of public concerns. The need of developing systems to analyze these sentiments and the topics behind them has emerged tremendously. While most existing works reported in the literature have been carried out in English, this paper, in contrast, aims to review recent research works in Arabic language in the field of thematic sentiment analysis and which techniques they have utilized to accomplish this task. The findings show that the prevailing techniques in Arabic topic-based sentiment analysis are based on traditional approaches and machine learning methods. In addition, it has been found that considerably limited recent studies have utilized deep learning approaches to build high performance models.