Arabic language investigation in the context of unimodal and multimodal sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is gaining high importance as a field of study in academia and industry. It becomes one of the most active research field in Artificial Intelligence and web mining Most of the work on sentiment analysis has focused on the English language. On the other hand, few studies are done on other languages that also dominate the Internet, including Arabic which is currently ranked as the fourth language used in the Internet. Research on this language remains weak and still suffers from several limitations and challenges. Moreover, people in several social media tend to use other kinds of data to express their opinions, mood and sentiment, including images, videos and audios. Thus, it is crucial to mine, understand and identify sentiments from different modalities. In this paper, we first present an outline of the progress of unimodal and multimodal sentiment analysis, most notably the Arabic language, and then we present the different limits and challenges of the Arabic in this domain.