Abstract
In recent years, research into developing state-of-the-art models for Arabic natural language processing tasks has gained momentum. These models must address the added difficulties related to the nature and structure of the Arabic language. In this paper, we propose three models, a human-engineered feature-based (HEF) model, a deep feature-based (DF) model, and a hybrid of both models (HEF+DF) for emotion recognition in Arabic text. We evaluated the performance of the proposed models on the SemEval-2018, IAEDS, and AETD datasets by comparing the performances of those models on each emotion label. We also compared the model performances with those of other state-of-the-art models. The results show that the HEF+DF model outperformed the DF and HEF models on all datasets. The DF model performed better than the HEF model on the SemEval-2018 and AETD datasets, while the HEF model performed better than the DF model on the IAEDS dataset. The HEF+DF model outperformed the state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy, weighted-average precision, weighted-average recall, and weighted-average F-score on the AETD dataset and in terms of accuracy, macro-averaged precision, macro-averaged recall, and macro-averaged F-score on the IAEDS dataset. It also achieved the best macro-averaged F-score and the second-best Jaccard accuracy and micro-averaged F-score on the SemEval-2018 dataset.