KACST Arabic Text Classification Project: Overview and Preliminary Results

Electronically formatted Arabic free-texts can be found in abundance these days on the World Wide Web, often linked to commercial enterprises and/or government organizations. Vast tracts of knowledge and relations lie hidden within these texts, knowledge that can be exploited once the correct intelligent tools have been identified and applied. For example, text mining may help with text classification and categorization. Text classification aims to automatically assign text to a predefined category based on identifiable linguistic features. Such a process has different useful applications including, but not restricted to, E-Mail spam detection, web pages content filtering, and automatic message routing. In this paper an overview of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) Arabic Text Classification Project will be illustrated along with some preliminary results. This project will contribute to the better understanding and elaboration of Arabic text classification techniques

Arabic Text Mining

The rapid growth of the internet has increased the number of online texts. This led to the rapid growth of the number of online texts in the Arabic language. The enormous amount of text must be organized into classes to make the analysis process and text retrieval easier. Text classification is, therefore, a key component of text mining. There are numerous systems and approaches for categorizing literature in English, European (French, German, Spanish), and Asian (Chinese, Japanese). In contrast, there are relatively few studies on categorizing Arabic literature due to the difficulty of the Arabic language. In this work, a brief explanation of key ideas relevant to Arabic text mining are introduced then a new classification system for the Arabic language is presented using light stemming and Classifier Na\"ive Bayesian (CNB). Texts from two classes: politics and sports, are included in our corpus. Some texts are added to the system, and the system correctly classified them, demonstrating the effectiveness of the system

Detecting Suicidality in Arabic Tweets Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques

Social media platforms have revolutionized traditional communication techniques by enabling people globally to connect instantaneously, openly, and frequently. People use social media to share personal stories and express their opinion. Negative emotions such as thoughts of death, self-harm, and hardship are commonly expressed on social media, particularly among younger generations. As a result, using social media to detect suicidal thoughts will help provide proper intervention that will ultimately deter others from self-harm and committing suicide and stop the spread of suicidal ideation on social media. To investigate the ability to detect suicidal thoughts in Arabic tweets automatically, we developed a novel Arabic suicidal tweets dataset, examined several machine learning models, including Na\"ive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, and XGBoost, trained on word frequency and word embedding features, and investigated the ability of pre-trained deep learning models, AraBert, AraELECTRA, and AraGPT2, to identify suicidal thoughts in Arabic tweets. The results indicate that SVM and RF models trained on character n-gram features provided the best performance in the machine learning models, with 86% accuracy and an F1 score of 79%. The results of the deep learning models show that AraBert model outperforms other machine and deep learning models, achieving an accuracy of 91\% and an F1-score of 88%, which significantly improves the detection of suicidal ideation in the Arabic tweets dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to develop an Arabic suicidality detection dataset from Twitter and to use deep-learning approaches in detecting suicidality in Arabic posts

Classification of Encouragement (Targhib) And Warning (Tarhib) Using Sentiment Analysis on Classical Arabic

The Holy Qur’an is the main religious text of Islam. The Qur’an has its own methods of Targhib (encouragement) and Tarhib (warning), which are important features of the Qur’an. Most of the Quranic verses would urge and encourage people to do right and good deeds, and also warn them from committing evil and bad deeds. The method of classifying a text into two opposing opinions has been applied previously in solving the problem of sentiment analysis. Currently, it is applied in identifying between Targhib (encouragement) and Tarhib (warning) verses in the Qur’an. Each verse of the Qur’an can be treated as either an encouragement, warning or neutral. The language of the Holy Qur’an is one of the most challenging natural languages in sentiment analysis.  The aim of this work is to classify the verses of encouragement and warning using sentiment analysis and NLP techniques. Several approaches are used in the Sentiment Analysis classification, such as the machine learning approach, the lexicon-based approach and the hybrid approach. In carrying out this aim, the applied machine learning approach was used, where the impact of the use of different techniques such as POS tagging, N-Gram and Feature selection with correlation based were evaluated and investigated. 95.6% accuracy was achieved using Naïve Bayes (NB) and 91.5% accuracy was achieved using the Support Vector Machines (SVM). This study is a significant study in extracting information and knowledge from the Holy Qur’an. It is significant for both researchers in the field of Islamic studies as well as non-specialized researchers

Arabic text classification methods: Systematic literature review of primary studies

Recent research on Big Data proposed and evaluated a number of advanced techniques to gain meaningful information from the complex and large volume of data available on the World Wide Web. To achieve accurate text analysis, a process is usually initiated with a Text Classification (TC) method. Reviewing the very recent literature in this area shows that most studies are focused on English (and other scripts) while attempts on classifying Arabic texts remain relatively very limited. Hence, we intend to contribute the first Systematic Literature Review (SLR) utilizing a search protocol strictly to summarize key characteristics of the different TC techniques and methods used to classify Arabic text, this work also aims to identify and share a scientific evidence of the gap in current literature to help suggesting areas for further research. Our SLR explicitly investigates empirical evidence as a decision factor to include studies, then conclude which classifier produced more accurate results. Further, our findings identify the lack of standardized corpuses for Arabic text; authors compile their own, and most of the work is focused on Modern Arabic with very little done on Colloquial Arabic despite its wide use in Social Media Networks such as Twitter. In total, 1464 papers were surveyed from which 48 primary studies were included and analyzed