The Impact of Text Preprocessing and Term Weighting on Arabic Text Classification

This research presents and compares the impact of text preprocessing, which has not been addressed before, on Arabic text classification using popular text classification algorithms; Decision Tree, K Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, Naïve Bayes and its variations. Text preprocessing includes applying different term weighting schemes, and Arabic morphological analysis (stemming and light stemming). We implemented and integrated Arabic morphological analysis tools within the leading open source machine learning tools: Weka, and RapidMiner. Text Classification algorithms are applied on seven Arabic corpora (3 in-house collected and 4 existing corpora). Experimental results show: (1) Light stemming with term pruning is best feature reduction technique. (2) Support Vector Machines and Naïve Bayes variations outperform other algorithms. (3) Weighting schemes impact the performance of distance based classifier

A text mining approach for Arabic question answering systems

As most of the electronic information available nowadays on the web is stored as text,developing Question Answering systems (QAS) has been the focus of many individualresearchers and organizations. Relatively, few studies have been produced for extractinganswers to “why” and “how to” questions. One reason for this negligence is that when goingbeyond sentence boundaries, deriving text structure is a very time-consuming and complexprocess. This thesis explores a new strategy for dealing with the exponentially large spaceissue associated with the text derivation task. To our knowledge, to date there are no systemsthat have attempted to addressing such type of questions for the Arabic language.We have proposed two analytical models; the first one is the Pattern Recognizer whichemploys a set of approximately 900 linguistic patterns targeting relationships that hold withinsentences. This model is enhanced with three independent algorithms to discover thecausal/explanatory role indicated by the justification particles. The second model is the TextParser which is approaching text from a discourse perspective in the framework of RhetoricalStructure Theory (RST). This model is meant to break away from the sentence limit. TheText Parser model is built on top of the output produced by the Pattern Recognizer andincorporates a set of heuristics scores to produce the most suitable structure representing thewhole text.The two models are combined together in a way to allow for the development of an ArabicQAS to deal with “why” and “how to” questions. The Pattern Recognizer model achieved anoverall recall of 81% and a precision of 78%. On the other hand, our question answeringsystem was able to find the correct answer for 68% of the test questions. Our results revealthat the justification particles play a key role in indicating intrasentential relations

B!SON: A Tool for Open Access Journal Recommendation

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project