Abstract In this paper, we propose to overcome the challenge of digesting opinions in a news article. Our objective is to provide a summary of opinions delivered by many sources about a main topic in an Arabic news article. In literature, several studies addressed issues related to opinion summarization. However, we noticed a lack of studies that address this problem in Arabic language. So, we have proposed two different methods: multi-criteria and machine learning-based methods. We proceed by comparing the results provided by the proposed methods for opinionated sentence extraction. The proposed methods were evaluated using two feature types: text-based features and opinion-specific features. Experimental results show the robustness of machine learning method to extract opinionated sentences with consideration of two sets of features.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid method for the spoken Tunisian dialect understanding within a limited task. This method couples a discriminative statistical method with a domain ontology. The statistical method is based on conditional random field (CRF) models learned from a little size corpus to perform conceptual labeling task. These models are able to detect the semantic dependency between words. However, the domain ontology is used to add prior knowledge about the task. Our experiments are based on a real spoken Tunisian dialect corpus. The obtained results show that the proposed method is able to improve the performance of CRF models for speech understanding by the integration of the domain ontology. Our method can be exploited for under-resourced languages and Arabic dialects to overcome the lack of linguistic resources .