Abstract
Most social media commentary in the Arabic language space is made using unstructured non-grammatical slang Arabic language, presenting complex challenges for sentiment analysis and opinion extraction of online commentary and micro blogging data in this important domain. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the important research works in the field of Arabic sentiment analysis. An in-depth qualitative analysis of the various features of the research works is carried out and a summary of objective findings is presented. We used smoothness analysis to evaluate the percentage error in the performance scores reported in the studies from their linearly-projected values (smoothness) which is an estimate of the influence of the different approaches used by the authors on the performance scores obtained. To solve a bounding issue with the data as it was reported, we modified existing logarithmic smoothing technique and applied it to pre-process the performance scores before the analysis. Our results from the analysis have been reported and interpreted for the various performance parameters: accuracy, precision, recall and F-score.