Arabic Sentiment analysis: an empirical study of machine translation's impact

International audience The largest amount of Sentiment Analysis has been carried out for English language. To deal with Arabic sentiment analysis, machine translation of English resources or Arabic texts may be applied to built Arabic sentiment analysis systems. In this paper, we translate Arabic dataset into English and study the impact of machine translation while considering a standard Arabic system as a baseline. Experiments show that sentiment analysis of Arabic content translated into English reach a competitive performance with respect to standard sentiment analysis of Arabic texts. This suggests that machine translation can successfully transfer the expression of sentiment or polarity. Moreover , we explored the multi-domain extending of training data in order to enhance performance and we show that we should have, in the training set, data whose domain is the same as the domain of evaluation dataset.