AraTSum: Arabic Twitter Trend Summarization Using Topic Analysis and Extractive Algorithms

Abstract Twitter’s trending topics enable users to view the topics currently being discussed on the platform. Users can stay up to date with news, events, and conversations. However, the platform’s method of sorting tweets by time can make it hard to gather semantic information. To fully comprehend the various dimensions of trends and the diverse opinions surrounding them, users need to sift through a substantial number of results. Traditional techniques for content summarization, such as multi-document summarization, can facilitate information aggregation, categorization, and visualization of events, but there are two challenges. First, they fail to consider the topic’s polarity, which is essential to covering all aspects of the subject and incorporating less popular opinions. Second, some techniques only provide summaries at the topic level, potentially leaving out crucial dimensions that require representation in this summary. This research developed a novel summarization approach on Twitter which is known as ARAbic Trending SUMmarization (AraTSum). The proposed system generates the summary based on the extracted topics and aspects from the trend. The approach involves a topic sentiment-based technique that combines generative statistical Latent Dirichlet Allocation with a pre-trained model to automatically reflect the sentiments (negative or positive) of tweets in each topic; followed by extractive summarization algorithms in each cluster. The AraTSum was evaluated through several experiments on five different X datasets. The obtained results showed that AraTSum outperformed existing approaches on the ROUGE evaluation metric compared to state-of-the-art Twitter event summarizing algorithms. To ensure a comprehensive and accurate evaluation, three human experts were tasked with manually summarizing the utilized five datasets. The results demonstrated that the proposed AraTSum method is dependent on sentiment topical aspect analysis, and it enhances the summarization's performance.