The Arab Image in Spanish Social Media: A Twitter Sentiment Analytics Approach

ABSTRACT

Intercultural relations scholars have recently focused on investigating the impact of the news coverage and the media on society in general. However, although social media have become a valuable resource for mining opinions, there are no previous studies investigating the Arab image sentiments expressed on social media. This study fills this gap through the analysis of a random sample of 26,905 tweets dealing with the Arab image in Spanish tweets. To conduct the analysis, an expert-predefined lexicon of around 6,800 seed adjectives was used. Descriptive analysis detected a generally positive sentiment towards the Arab image while partitioning around medoids (PAM) clustering suggested that it is possible to cluster the tweets into four distinct clusters. Thus, it seems that the Arab image represents a complex construction. By analysing opinions expressed on social media towards the Arab image, this research adds breadth and depth to the debate over such an under-represented area.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab image
• social media
• sentiment analysis
• PAM clustering
• topic modelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohamed M. Mostafa

Mohamed M. Mostafa has received a PhD in Business from the Manchester Business School, the University of Manchester, UK. He has also earned a MS in Applied Statistics from the University of Northern Colorado, USA, a MA in French Language and Civilization from Middlebury College, USA, a MA in Social Science Data Analysis from Essex University, UK, a MA in Translation Studies from Portsmouth University, UK, a MSc in Functional Neuroimaging from Brunel University, UK and a MS in Affective Neuroscience from the University of Maastricht/the University of Florence. He was employed at universities in the USA, Portugal, Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, France, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Currently, he works as a professor at GUST, Kuwait while pursuing another doctorate degree at the University of Malaga. He has published over 90 research papers in several leading academic peer reviewed journals, including Economic Modelling, Social Indicators Research, Expert Systems with Applications, Sustainable Development, International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Social Network Analysis & Mining, International Journal of Intelligent Computing & Cybernetics, Neural Computing and Applications, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Journal of Promotion Management, Journal of Marketing Communications, International Journal of Consumer Studies, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Tourism Review, Health Marketing Quarterly, Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, Journal of International Consumer Marketing. He has also presented numerous papers at professional conferences worldwide.

Nicolás Roser Nebot

Nicolás Roser Nebot earned his PhD at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1997. He also holds a degree in Semitic Philology at the University of Granada. He has been a sworn translator of Arabic since 1996. He is also a conference interpreter in the Arabic-Spanish/Spanish-Arabic and Catalan-Arabic/Arabic-Catalan combinations. Since 1991, he has been working as a Full Professor of Arabic language at the University of Málaga, Spain. He specializes in the political theory of Islam and in teaching Arabic language/Translation. He has supervised several doctoral theses and he is also the Catalan and Spanish translator of Ta’rij Mayurqa (Crónica de Mallorca) by Ibn ‘Amira al-Majzumí de Alzira (1186–1260).