Analysing Language in Arabic Tweets about the Arab Spring

Seattle.
The final paper at AoIR 2011 is presented in absentia of the original authors, who were led by Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, and focusses on the use of Twitter during the continuing Arab Spring uprisings. It examines the linguistic features of the forms of Arabic used in these tweets, as well as the topics and sentiments expressed. The authors examined some 2000 tweets sampled at random from some 233,000 tweets gatered between November 2009 and February 2011. Tweets were coded for topic across a range of thematic categories, for language (standard vs. non-standard Arabic), and sentiment (objective, subjective; positive, negative, neutral, mixed).

There were many instances of paralinguistic and prosodic cues, as well as emoticons; not much mixing of Arabic and Latin characters; and not many abbreviations. Some 66% of tweets were in standard Arabic, the rest in non-standard variations); over 50% of tweets were subjective, and 41% of those tweets were positive. Culture, politics, and interpersonal communication dominated. This is one of the first studies of morphologically rich languages, then (as opposed to English).