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Abstract
The Saudi Professional League (SPL) has attained global recognition through its recruitment of high-profile international players, yet this rise has intensified public scrutiny regarding incidents involving these athletes, such as Controversies surrounding sportsmanship, provocative celebrations, verbal altercations with spectators. This study analyzes (4,884) Arabic-language posts from (2021 to 2024), employing Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) and the fine-tuned MARBERT model. The findings reveal a dominant negative sentiment (71.9%) across the dataset, with 'Player-Conduct' and 'Disciplinary-Action' emerging as the most frequently discussed aspects. Co-occurrence and correlation analyses indicate that negative sentiment is closely tied to perceptions of inadequate governance and cultural misalignment within the SPL, further intensifying public dissatisfaction. This research underscores the duality of high-profile players as drivers of global visibility and sources of domestic tension, particularly within culturally sensitive contexts. By addressing these challenges, the SPL can mitigate reputational risks while harmonizing its international ambitions with domestic expectations. This study advances Arabic Aspect-based sentiment analysis in the sports domain and provides actionable insights to enhance ethical governance, align with cultural sensitivities, and strengthen stakeholder engagement, thereby supporting the SPL’s long-term credibility and growth.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Dheya Ali Qasem Alraimi, Irving Vitra Paputungan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
References
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References
D. Schreyer and C. Singleton, “Cristiano of Arabia: Did Ronaldo Increase Saudi Pro League Attendances?,” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2023, doi: 10.2139/SSRN.4552736.
D. Lovin, A. Căpățînă, and D. Bernardeau Moreau, “Adaptation, integration and acculturation of foreign athletes in sports organizations in,” QUALITY IN SPORT, vol. 2, no. 7, pp. 7–23, doi: 10.12775/QS.2021.007.
M. M. Achoui, “The Saudi society: Tradition and change,” Families Across Cultures: A 30-Nation Psychological Study, pp. 435–441, Jan. 2006, doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511489822.033.
“Transformer Models for Authorship Profiling in Arabic Social Media Texts | Request PDF.” Accessed: Jan. 05, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383374376_Transformer_Models_for_Authorship_Profiling_in_Arabic_Social_Media_Texts
S. Stieglitz, M. Mirbabaie, B. Ross, and C. Neuberger, “Social media analytics – Challenges in topic discovery, data collection, and data preparation,” Int J Inf Manage, vol. 39, pp. 156–168, Apr. 2018, doi: 10.1016/J.IJINFOMGT.2017.12.002.
A. Bruns and Y. E. Liang, “Tools and methods for capturing Twitter data during natural disasters,” First Monday, vol. 17, no. 4, Mar. 2012, doi: 10.5210/FM.V17I4.3937.
A. Abdelali, S. Hassan, H. Mubarak, K. Darwish, and Y. Samih, “Pre-Training BERT on Arabic Tweets: Practical Considerations,” Feb. 2021, Accessed: Jan. 05, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10684v1
N. Habash, R. Roth, O. Rambow, R. Eskander, and N. Tomeh, “Morphological Analysis and Disambiguation for Dialectal Arabic,” 2013. Accessed: Jan. 05, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://aclanthology.org/N13-1044/
A. Nazir, Y. Rao, L. Wu, and L. Sun, “Issues and Challenges of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey,” IEEE Trans Affect Comput, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 845–863, 2022, doi: 10.1109/TAFFC.2020.2970399.
M. Hoang, O. Alija Bihorac, and J. Rouces, “Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Using BERT”.
S. AlNasser and S. AlMuhaideb, “Listening to Patients: Advanced Arabic Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Using Transformer Models Towards Better Healthcare,” Big Data and Cognitive Computing 2024, Vol. 8, Page 156, vol. 8, no. 11, p. 156, Nov. 2024, doi: 10.3390/BDCC8110156.
J. Devlin, M. W. Chang, K. Lee, and K. Toutanova, “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding,” NAACL HLT 2019 - 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies - Proceedings of the Conference, vol. 1, pp. 4171–4186, Oct. 2018, Accessed: Jan. 05, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805v2
A. Safaya, M. Abdullatif, and D. Yuret, “KUISAIL at SemEval-2020 Task 12: BERT-CNN for Offensive Speech Identification in Social Media,” 14th International Workshops on Semantic Evaluation, SemEval 2020 - co-located 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2020, Proceedings, pp. 2054–2059, 2020, doi: 10.18653/V1/2020.SEMEVAL-1.271.
K. A. Alshaikh, O. A. Almatrafi, and Y. B. Abushark, “BERT-Based Model for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Analyzing Arabic Open-Ended Survey Responses: A Case Study,” IEEE Access, vol. 12, pp. 2288–2302, 2024, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3348342.
W. Antoun, F. Baly, and H. Hajj, “AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding,” 2020. Accessed: Jan. 05, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://aclanthology.org/2020.osact-1.2/
N. Al‐twairesh, “The Evolution of Language Models Applied to Emotion Analysis of Arabic Tweets,” Information 2021, Vol. 12, Page 84, vol. 12, no. 2, p. 84, Feb. 2021, doi: 10.3390/INFO12020084.
A. Abuzayed and H. Al-Khalifa, “Sarcasm and Sentiment Detection In Arabic Tweets Using BERT-based Models and Data Augmentation,” 2021. Accessed: Jan. 22, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://aclanthology.org/2021.wanlp-1.38/
M. Errami, M. A. Ouassil, R. Rachidi, B. Cherradi, S. Hamida, and A. Raihani, “Investigating the Performance of BERT Model for Sentiment Analysis on Moroccan News Comments,” 2023 3rd International Conference on Innovative Research in Applied Science, Engineering and Technology, IRASET 2023, 2023, doi: 10.1109/IRASET57153.2023.10152965.
M. Abdul-Mageed, A. R. Elmadany, and E. M. B. Nagoudi, “ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic,” ACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference, pp. 7088–7105, 2021, doi: 10.18653/V1/2021.ACL-LONG.551.
F. Belbachir, “Foul at SemEval-2023 Task 12: MARBERT Language model and lexical filtering for sentiments analysis of tweets in Algerian Arabic,” 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, SemEval 2023 - Proceedings of the Workshop, pp. 389–396, 2023, doi: 10.18653/V1/2023.SEMEVAL-1.52.
A. Krouska et al., “MTL-AraBERT: An Enhanced Multi-Task Learning Model for Arabic Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis,” Computers 2024, Vol. 13, Page 98, vol. 13, no. 4, p. 98, Apr. 2024, doi: 10.3390/COMPUTERS13040098.
L. Alsudias and P. Rayson, “COVID-19 and Arabic Twitter: How can Arab World Governments and Public Health Organizations Learn from Social Media?,” 2020. Accessed: Jan. 15, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcovid19-acl.16/
M. Ibrahim, “THEMATIC ANALYSIS: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF ITS PROCESS AND EVALUATION,” West East Journal of Social Sciences-December, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012.
R. Bensoltane and T. Zaki, “Towards Arabic aspect-based sentiment analysis: a transfer learning-based approach,” Soc Netw Anal Min, vol. 12, no. 1, Dec. 2022, doi: 10.1007/S13278-021-00794-4.
R. G. Pontius and M. Millones, “Death to Kappa: Birth of quantity disagreement and allocation disagreement for accuracy assessment,” Int J Remote Sens, vol. 32, no. 15, pp. 4407–4429, 2011, doi: 10.1080/01431161.2011.552923/ASSET/5F270ABE-4E96-4C5B-84FB-1DE54244907C/ASSETS/IMAGES/TRES_A_552923_O_ILM0007.GIF.
S. Alyami, A. Alhothali, and A. Jamal, “Systematic literature review of arabic aspect-based sentiment analysis,” Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences, vol. 34, no. 9, pp. 6524–6551, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.1016/J.JKSUCI.2022.07.001.
S. A. Hicks et al., “On evaluation metrics for medical applications of artificial intelligence,” Sci Rep, vol. 12, no. 1, Dec. 2022, doi: 10.1038/S41598-022-09954-8.
D. Schreyer and C. Singleton, “Cristiano of Arabia: Did Ronaldo Increase Saudi Pro League Attendances?,” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2023, doi: 10.2139/SSRN.4552736.
M. Mutz, “A new flagship of global football: the rise of global attention towards Saudi Arabia’s pro league,” Front Sports Act Living, vol. 6, 2024, doi: 10.3389/FSPOR.2024.1293751.
R. GRYSHUK, “SPORTS AND INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION: HOW QATAR AND SAUDI ARABIA UTILIZE SPORTS TO ENHANCE THEIR IMAGE,” Філософія та політологія в контексті сучасної культури, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 164–170, Jul. 2024, doi: 10.15421/3524