Abstract
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The evolution of this pandemic has raised global health concerns, making people worry about how to protect themselves and their families. This has greatly impacted people's sentiments. There was a dire need to investigate a large amount of social data such as tweets and others that emerged during the post-pandemic era for the assessment of people's sentiments. As a result, this study aims at Arabic tweet-based sentiment analysis considering the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia. The datasets have been collected in two different periods in three major regions in Saudi Arabia, which are: Riyadh, Dammam, and Jeddah. Tweets were annotated with three sentiments: positive, negative, and neutral after due pre-processing. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and bi-directional long short memory (BiLSTM) deep learning algorithms were applied for classifying the sentiment of Arabic tweets. This experiment showed that the performance of CNN achieved 92.80% accuracy. The performance of BiLSTM was scored at 91.99% in terms of accuracy. Moreover, as an outcome of this study, an overwhelming upsurge in negative sentiments were observed in the dataset during COVID-19 compared to the negative sentiments of the dataset before COVID-19. The technique has been compared with the state-of-the-art techniques in the literature and it was observed that the proposed technique is promising in terms of various performance parameters.