Weakly Supervised Deep Learning for Arabic Tweet Sentiment Analysis on Education Reforms: Leveraging Pre-Trained Models and LLMs With Snorkel
Alanoud Fahad Alotaibi, Farrukh Nadeem, Mohamed Hamdy · IEEE Access · 2025
This study introduces a novel approach to sentiment classification of Arabic tweets regarding educational reforms in Saudi Arabia. The complexity of the Arabic language, with its numerous dialects, poses challenges for natural language processing tasks, particularly when large volumes of data require manual annotation. To overcome the limitations of traditional labeling methods, we developed a weakly supervised learning framework that combines LLMs (GPT-3.5) and pre-trained language models (MarBERT and XLM-RoBERTa) to generate high-quality weakly labeled training data using the Snorkel framework. We fine-tuned the AraBERT model with this weakly labeled data for sentiment classification. Our experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving 83% precision, 76% recall, and an 85% F1 score in classifying tweets as positive, negative, or neutral. Comparative analysis showed that GPT-3.5 outperformed Llama 2 in prompting tasks, and our weakly supervised model surpassed baseline machine learning methods. These findings highlight the potential of weakly supervised learning in analyzing public opinion on Arabic social media platforms without relying on large, labeled datasets.