Otrouha: A Corpus of Arabic ETDs and a Framework for Automatic Subject Classification

Although the Arabic language is spoken by more than 300 million people and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (UN), there has been less research done on Arabic text data (compared to English) in the realm of machine learning, especially in text classification. In the past decade, Arabic data such as news, tweets, etc. have begun to receive some attention. Although automatic text classification plays an important role in improving the browsability and accessibility of data, Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) have not received their fair share of attention, in spite of the huge number of benefits they provide to students, universities, and future generations of scholars. There are two main roadblocks to performing automatic subject classification on Arabic ETDs. The first is the unavailability of a public corpus of Arabic ETDs. The second is the linguistic complexity of the Arabic language; that complexity is particularly evident in academic documents such as ETDs. To address these roadblocks, this paper presents Otrouha, a framework for automatic subject classification of Arabic ETDs, which has two main goals. The first is building a Corpus of Arabic ETDs and their key metadata such as abstracts, keywords, and title to pave the way for more exploratory research on this valuable genre of data. The second is to provide a framework for automatic subject classification of Arabic ETDs through different classification models that use classical machine learning as well as deep learning techniques. The first goal is aided by searching the AskZad Digital Library, which is part of the Saudi Digital Library (SDL). AskZad provides other key metadata of Arabic ETDs, such as abstract, title, and keywords. The current search results consist of abstracts of Arabic ETDs. This raw data then undergoes a pre-processing phase that includes stop word removal using the Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK), and word lemmatization using the Farasa API. To date, abstracts of 518 ETDs across 12 subjects have been collected. For the second goal, the preliminary results show that among the machine learning models, binary classification (one-vs.-all) performed better than multiclass classification. The maximum per subject accuracy is 95%, with an average accuracy of 68% across all subjects. It is noteworthy that the binary classification model performed better for some categories than others. For example, Applied Science and Technology shows 95% accuracy, while the category of Administration shows 36%. Deep learning models resulted in higher accuracy but lower F-measure; their overall performance is lower than machine learning models. This may be due to the small size of the dataset as well as the imbalance in the number of documents per category. Work to collect additional ETDs will be aided by collaborative contributions of data from additional sources

Clustering Arabic Tweets for Sentiment Analysis

The focus of this study is to evaluate the impact of linguistic preprocessing and similarity functions for clustering Arabic Twitter tweets. The experiments apply an optimized version of the standard K-Means algorithm to assign tweets into positive and negative categories. The results show that root-based stemming has a significant advantage over light stemming in all settings. The Averaged Kullback-Leibler Divergence similarity function clearly outperforms the Cosine, Pearson Correlation, Jaccard Coefficient and Euclidean functions. The combination of the Averaged Kullback-Leibler Divergence and root-based stemming achieved the highest purity of 0.764 while the second-best purity was 0.719. These results are of importance as it is contrary to normal-sized documents where, in many information retrieval applications, light stemming performs better than root-based stemming and the Cosine function is commonly used

Clustering Arabic Tweets for Sentiment Analysis

The focus of this study is to evaluate the impact of linguistic preprocessing and similarity functions for clustering Arabic Twitter tweets. The experiments apply an optimized version of the standard K-Means algorithm to assign tweets into positive and negative categories. The results show that root-based stemming has a significant advantage over light stemming in all settings. The Averaged Kullback-Leibler Divergence similarity function clearly outperforms the Cosine, Pearson Correlation, Jaccard Coefficient and Euclidean functions. The combination of the Averaged Kullback-Leibler Divergence and root-based stemming achieved the highest purity of 0.764 while the second-best purity was 0.719. These results are of importance as it is contrary to normal-sized documents where, in many information retrieval applications, light stemming performs better than root-based stemming and the Cosine function is commonly used

A systematic review of text classification research based on deep learning models in Arabic language

Classifying or categorizing texts is the process by which documents are classified into groups by subject, title, author, etc. This paper undertakes a systematic review of the latest research in the field of the classification of Arabic texts. Several machine learning techniques can be used for text classification, but we have focused only on the recent trend of neural network algorithms. In this paper, the concept of classifying texts and classification processes are reviewed. Deep learning techniques in classification and its type are discussed in this paper as well. Neural networks of various types, namely, RNN, CNN, FFNN, and LSTM, are identified as the subject of study. Through systematic study, 12 research papers related to the field of the classification of Arabic texts using neural networks are obtained: for each paper the methodology for each type of neural network and the accuracy ration for each type is determined. The evaluation criteria used in the algorithms of different neural network types and how they play a large role in the highly accurate classification of Arabic texts are discussed. Our results provide some findings regarding how deep learning models can be used to improve text classification research in Arabic language

Content Recognition and Context Modeling for Document Analysis and Retrieval

The nature and scope of available documents are changing significantly in many areas of document analysis and retrieval as complex, heterogeneous collections become accessible to virtually everyone via the web. The increasing level of diversity presents a great challenge for document image content categorization, indexing, and retrieval. Meanwhile, the processing of documents with unconstrained layouts and complex formatting often requires effective leveraging of broad contextual knowledge. In this dissertation, we first present a novel approach for document image content categorization, using a lexicon of shape features. Each lexical word corresponds to a scale and rotation invariant local shape feature that is generic enough to be detected repeatably and is segmentation free. A concise, structurally indexed shape lexicon is learned by clustering and partitioning feature types through graph cuts. Our idea finds successful application in several challenging tasks, including content recognition of diverse web images and language identification on documents composed of mixed machine printed text and handwriting. Second, we address two fundamental problems in signature-based document image retrieval. Facing continually increasing volumes of documents, detecting and recognizing unique, evidentiary visual entities (\eg, signatures and logos) provides a practical and reliable supplement to the OCR recognition of printed text. We propose a novel multi-scale framework to detect and segment signatures jointly from document images, based on the structural saliency under a signature production model. We formulate the problem of signature retrieval in the unconstrained setting of geometry-invariant deformable shape matching and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in signature matching and verification. Third, we present a model-based approach for extracting relevant named entities from unstructured documents. In a wide range of applications that require structured information from diverse, unstructured document images, processing OCR text does not give satisfactory results due to the absence of linguistic context. Our approach enables learning of inference rules collectively based on contextual information from both page layout and text features. Finally, we demonstrate the importance of mining general web user behavior data for improving document ranking and other web search experience. The context of web user activities reveals their preferences and intents, and we emphasize the analysis of individual user sessions for creating aggregate models. We introduce a novel algorithm for estimating web page and web site importance, and discuss its theoretical foundation based on an intentional surfer model. We demonstrate that our approach significantly improves large-scale document retrieval performance

Bibliometric Survey on Incremental Learning in Text Classification Algorithms for False Information Detection

The false information or misinformation over the web has severe effects on people, business and society as a whole. Therefore, detection of misinformation has become a topic of research among many researchers. Detecting misinformation of textual articles is directly connected to text classification problem. With the massive and dynamic generation of unstructured textual documents over the web, incremental learning in text classification has gained more popularity. This survey explores recent advancements in incremental learning in text classification and review the research publications of the area from Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and IEEE databases and perform quantitative analysis by using methods such as publication statistics, collaboration degree, research network analysis, and citation analysis. The contribution of this study in incremental learning in text classification provides researchers insights on the latest status of the research through literature survey, and helps the researchers to know the various applications and the techniques used recently in the field