Abstract
Sentiment analysis (SA) aims to extract users' opinions automatically from their posts and comments. Almost all prior works have used machine learning algorithms. Recently, SA research has shown promising performance in using the deep learning approach. However, deep learning is greedy and requires large datasets to learn, so it takes more time for data annotation. In this research, we proposed a semiautomatic approach using Naive Bayes (NB) to annotate a new dataset in order to reduce the human effort and time spent on the annotation process. We created a dataset for the purpose of training and testing the classifier by collecting Saudi dialect tweets. The dataset produced from the semiautomatic model was then used to train and test deep learning classifiers to perform Saudi dialect SA. The accuracy achieved by the NB classifier was 83%. The trained semiautomatic model was used to annotate the new dataset before it was fed into the deep learning classifiers. The three deep learning classifiers tested in this research were convolutional neural network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM). Support vector machine (SVM) was used as the baseline for comparison. Overall, the performance of the deep learning classifiers exceeded that of SVM. The results showed that CNN reported the highest performance. On one hand, the performance of Bi-LSTM was higher than that of LSTM and SVM, and, on the other hand, the performance of LSTM was higher than that of SVM. The proposed semiautomatic annotation approach is usable and promising to increase speed and save time and effort in the annotation process.