Mining Arabic Business Reviews

For languages with rich content over the web, business reviews are easily accessible via many known websites, e.g., Yelp.com. For languages with poor content over the web like Arabic, there are very few websites (we are actually aware of only one that is indeed unpopular) that provide business reviews. However, this does not mean that such reviews do not exist. They indeed exist unstructured in websites not originally intended for reviews, e.g., Forums and Blogs. Hence, there is a need to mine for those Arabic reviews from the web in order to provide them in the search results when a user searches for a business or a category of businesses. In this paper, we show how to extract the business reviews scattered on the web written in the Arabic language. The mined reviews are analyzed to also provide their sentiments (positive, negative or neutral). This way, we provide our users the information they need about the local businesses in the language they understand, and therefore provide a better search experience for the Middle East region, which mostly speaks Arabic.

• Data Mining and Modeling