# Analyzing the Effect of Negation in Sentiment Polarity of Facebook Dialectal Arabic Text
## 3 Materials and Methods  
The majority of analyses of Arabic do not focus specifically upon DA. Within Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), negation is achieved by a well-defined set of words that can be used to invert the polarity of opinionated words, for example, as in [-1.1] (not beautiful). For sentiment analysis, when the spelling rules are appropriately followed, these words can be detected easily. However, in DA, inverters are less well defined. Different words originate from different dialects without reference to any agreed spelling rules. Thus, in addition to the challenges already discussed, DA sentiment analysis taking account of negation is particularly challenging. Table 1 represents a table that shows some Arabic negation words, referred to as inverters, for both used in MSA and their corresponding word in DA. While MSA inverters can be used in DA, DA inverters are not conformant with MSA. It is even more complicated when the negation is part of the word itself such as the DA inverter, the Arabic letter M () acts as a prefix and negates the target to which it is attached, such as [-1.1] (I did not love him). The dataset [22] used in this paper consists of 1000 posts. The distribution of posts in the dataset is available in Table 2. It is based on two corpora. The first corpus is a corpus of new (CN) that contains posts retrieved from the Facebook page of AlArabiya News [23]. The other corpus is a corpus of arts, referred to as CA, contains posts retrieved from the Facebook page of The Voice [24], which is a page that covers the news of a singing competition. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**MSA Inverters** & **DA Inverters** & **Translation** \\ \hline \(\backslash\) & \(\backslash\) & does/do not \\ \(\backslash\) & \(\backslash\) & does/do not \\ \(\backslash\) & \(\backslash\) & without \\ \(\backslash\) & \(\backslash\) & there is no \\ \(\backslash\) & \(\backslash\) & There will not be \\ \(\backslash\) & \(\backslash\) & without \\ \(\backslash\) & \(\backslash\) & No \\ \(\backslash\) & \(\backslash\) & without \\ \(\backslash\) & \(\backslash\) & without \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Some Arabic Negation Words (Inverters). All posts in the dataset are classified into three sets: spam (containing patterns used to advertise a page or a product), negative (containing patterns used to express negative opinions), and positive (containing patterns used to express positive opinions). In [12], more details are provided about the classification procedure. The subsequent analysis showed 17% of posts are incorrectly classified due to ignoring negation. These misclassified negation cases are analyzed in this work, and the following different scenario case identified: Inverters are expressed in many forms even within the same dialect such as _'s_'s spelled as \"Manu\" and _'s_'s spelled as \"Maanu\". These words can be used to say, for example, not beautiful as _'s_'s and _'s_'s_'s_'s. The exact words used in negation may have other meanings that are not related to negation like _'s_'s, spelled as \"Ma Arwa'a\" which means \"how great\". The word _'s_' can be used in negation to say not beautiful as _'s_'s. Strings representing inverters can occur as part of words not related to negation, such as the occurrence of _'s_ (la) in _'s_'s, spelled as \"Maleykhe\" which means angels. In this context, _'s_' is part of the word _'s_'s_'; however, in another context, it can be separate negation word such as _'s_'', spelled as \"la truhn\" which means \"do not go\". Negation also takes place by using suffixes as in _'s_'s (truhnals--do not go), prefixes as in _'s_'s (Matruh--do not go) or as a separate word preceding the target as in _'s_'s (la truhn--do not go). The scope of negating terms is variable, the vast majority of cases, the scope was 1, i.e., the target came directly after the inverter. Not all inverters flip the polarity of an opinionated term. These characteristics correspond to cases in the first category of negatives mentioned in [16].