---
title: "ARB-SEN at SemEval-2018 Task1 — paper by Nagoudi (2018)"
description: "It then builds four groups of hand-crafted features: sentiment lexicon scores, a negation flag… 26 references, cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["El Moatez Billah Nagoudi"]
year: 2018
venue: "Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/S18-1055/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/s18-1055"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nagoudi-2018-arb-sen-semeval-2018-task1/"
---
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# ARB-SEN at SemEval-2018 Task1: A New Set of Features for Enhancing the Sentiment Intensity Prediction in Arabic Tweets

**Authors:** [El Moatez Billah Nagoudi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/el-moatez-billah-nagoudi/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semeval/) ([SemEval 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semeval/2018/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/S18-1055/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/S18-1055.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/s18-1055](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/s18-1055) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2807683594)

**Citations:** 2 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 1 in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper tackles valence intensity regression for Arabic tweets (the V-reg Arabic sub-task of SemEval-2018 Task1: Affect in Tweets). The goal is to predict a real-valued sentiment strength for each tweet rather than just a polarity label. ARB-SEN cleans tweets by stripping user mentions, RTs, URLs and diacritics, splitting hashtags into words, and normalising interchangeable Arabic letters. It then builds four groups of hand-crafted features: sentiment lexicon scores, a negation flag, word-embedding-derived lexicon scores, and emoticon/emoji indicators. These features feed two scikit-learn regressors, Linear Regression and SVR, trained on the organisers' training and development tweets. On the 731-tweet test set, SVR with all features reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.720, placing 6th. LR with all features reaches 0.617. An incremental ablation shows that every feature group helps, with the embedding and emoji features giving the largest gains. The work shows that a small, transparent feature set can be competitive in a low-data, morphologically rich setting.

## Key points
- Four lexicons supply the SLF features:
  - the SemEval-2016 Arabic lexicon of Kiritchenko et al. (1,168 words plus 198 phrases);
  - the Mohammad & Kiritchenko co-occurrence lexicon (~43k entries);
  - ArabSenti (14k manually labelled words);
  - a dialectal lexicon of 480+ words (Refaee & Rieser).
- Each tweet gets sum, average, min and max lexicon scores. Words absent from a lexicon are skipped.
- The WEF features rely on embeddings from Zahran et al.'s (2015) Arabic CBOW model. Each word is scored by the averaged lexicon scores of its 5 nearest neighbours.
- The negation feature (NF) is a binary flag based on five MSA negation words.
- Training data: 933 training and 139 development tweets.
- Cumulative ablation, Pearson correlation:

| Features | LR | SVR |
|---|---|---|
| SLF | 0.523 | 0.647 |
| +NF | 0.524 | 0.649 |
| +WEF | 0.561 | 0.683 |
| +EEF | 0.617 | 0.720 |

  The baseline scores −0.052.

## Interesting ideas
- Back off from a sparse lexicon through embedding neighbours: score each word by averaging the known scores of its five closest vectors, which extends coverage to words the lexicon lacks.
- Summarise per-word scores with sum, mean, min and max together, so a single strongly charged word is not washed out by the average.
- A tweet-level negation flag added almost nothing (+0.001/+0.002), which suggests negation without scope is nearly useless as a signal.
- Report ablations cumulatively, adding one feature group at a time for both a weak and a strong learner, so a feature's contribution can be checked for consistency across models.
- Break hashtags into their component words before analysis, so the sentiment-bearing content inside a tag becomes visible to the downstream features.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (world): the compiled value/valence knowledge could use a neighbour-based fallback for out-of-lexicon lemmas, storing the neighbour list as the explanation and flagging the value as derived, not attested.
- **I2** (frames): keeping both the extreme positive and extreme negative item in a clause would give the irony detector a cheap signal for sharp polarity contrast inside one utterance.
- **I3** (frames): attach negation to the specific predicate it governs in the UD tree, and flip the polarity only of that frame, rather than marking the whole text.
- **I4** (learn): evaluation runs could add each repair rule or knowledge source stepwise under two parsers, confirming that a gain is not tied to one model.
- **I5** (tokens): the en tokenizer could segment hashtags and camel-cased handles into words before tagging and lemmatisation, keeping the original span for traceability.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Eloued](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-eloued/) — University, El Oued, Algeria · 2 works · 6 citations

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🧭 Topics (2): [😊 Sentiment & emotion](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/sentiment-emotion/) · 972 works · [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) · 2,908 works

## Cite

Cite as: El Moatez Billah Nagoudi. 2018. ARB-SEN at SemEval-2018 Task1: A New Set of Features for Enhancing the Sentiment Intensity Prediction in Arabic Tweets. Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{nagoudi2018arb,
  title = {{ARB-SEN at SemEval-2018 Task1: A New Set of Features for Enhancing the Sentiment Intensity Prediction in Arabic Tweets}},
  author = {El Moatez Billah Nagoudi},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/s18-1055},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/s18-1055}
}
```

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## References

26 references, 15 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*