Constructing twitter corpus of Iraqi Arabic Dialect (CIAD) for sentiment analysis

The number of Twitter users in Iraq has increased significantly in recent years. Major events, the political situation in the country, had a significant impact on the content of Twitter and affected the tweets of Iraqi users. Creating an Iraqi Arabic Dialect corpus is crucial for sentiment analysis to study such behaviors. Since no such corpus existed, this paper introduces the Corpus of Iraqi Arabic Dialect (CIAD). The corpus has been collected, annotated and made publicly accessible to other researchers for further investigation. Furthermore, the created corpus has been validated using eight different combinations of four feature-selections approaches and two versions of Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. Various performance measures were calculated. The obtained accuracy, 78 %, indicates a promising potential application.