Exploring Differences in the Impact of Users’ Traces on Arabic and English Facebook Search

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach on Facebook search in Arabic and English, which exploits several users’ traces (e.g. comment, share, reactions) left on Facebook posts to estimate their social importance. Our goal is to show how these social traces (signals) can play a vital role in improving Arabic and English Facebook search. Firstly, we identify polarities (positive or negative) carried by the textual signals (e.g. comments) and non-textual ones (e.g. the reactions love and sad) for a given Facebook posts. Therefore, the polarity of each comment expressed in Arabic or in English on a given Facebook post, is estimated on the basis of a neural sentiment model. Secondly, we group signals according to their complementarity using attributes (features) selection algorithms. Thirdly, we apply learning to rank (LTR) algorithms to re-rank Facebook search results based on the selected groups of signals. Finally, experiments are carried out on 13,500 Facebook posts, collected from 45 topics, for each of the two languages. Experiments results reveal that Random Forests was the most effective LTR approach for this task, and for the both languages. However, the best appropriate features selection algorithms are ReliefFAttributeEval and InfoGainAttributeEval for Arabic and English Facebook search task, respectively.