Towards Understanding Egyptian Arabic Dialogues

Labelling of user's utterances to understanding his attends which called Dialogue Act (DA) classification, it is considered the key player for dialogue language understanding layer in automatic dialogue systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to user's utterances labeling for Egyptian spontaneous dialogues and Instant Messages using Machine Learning (ML) approach without relying on any special lexicons, cues, or rules. Due to the lack of Egyptian dialect dialogue corpus, the system evaluated by multi-genre corpus includes 4725 utterances for three domains, which are collected and annotated manually from Egyptian call-centers. The system achieves F1 scores of 70. 36% overall domains.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1505.0308

Development of a Secured Information System to Manage Malaria Related Cases in South Western region of Nigeria

Effective community based management of malaria incidences in most community health care centers are hampered by failure in the prompt diagnosis and treatment of malaria. This challenge is exacerbated by the emergence of multidrug resistant plasmodium parasites which makes ineffective most of the effective therapeutic drugs used in the treatment of malaria. Furthermore, even at abrupt changes in the therapeutic recommendations does not always translate to an immediate change in the effective management and control of malaria. Thus, the quest for effective diagnosis and appropriate treatment becomes a daunting and necessary task. . In this article, a secured Information system to manage malaria related cases was developed by 2-tier architecture by using the VB.NET programming language within the Microsoft Visual studio 2008 edition. The database employed for storing relevant data was the SQL server 2005 edition and fingerprint device integrated into the information system was the Microsoft fingerprint reader. From the results in this study, we modeled a feasible medical history system for prompt diagnosis, effective drug recommendations and promulgation of policies that would serve as palliatives for community health care centers that suffers shortages in material and human resources handling malaria and its related diseases

Computational Predictive Framework towards the Control and Reduction of Malaria incidences in Africa

Malaria persists as a problematic disease in Africa. It is the main cause of morbidity and mortality of children and efforts are currently being pooled to increase the control measures within endemic countries. With this in mind, we developed and applied a malaria control strategy from a computational perspective, to analyze, predict and offer appropriate recommendations and control measures of malaria data obtained from WHO ten Sub Saharan countries malaria report of 2008 . The analytical tool used is based on the C# programming language embedded artificial neural network intelligence system. From the outcome obtained, the system demonstrated some level of intelligence and showed the effects and impacts of some controllable factors on future malaria occurrence. The system at 90% prediction intensity showed malaria infection course to decline sharply by 2014 in all the study countries, ranging from 15.71% in Madagascar, 35.46% in Malawi, 38.44% in Nigeria, 38.98% in Sudan , 39.05% in Ethiopia 39.09% in Zambia, 40,08% in Ghana, 42.61% in Kenya, 45.21% in Uganda and 46.63% Mozambique respectively. Therefore, more future prevention, control and management interventions are needed in Madagascar and Mozambique by 2014 as compared to the rest of the countries studied. In conclusion, the tool can be used to produce sensible and logical results which can be applied to achieve reduction of possible future malaria occurrences by governmental, NGOs and other relevant health agencies for proper public health planning

Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201

A participatory approach for digital documentation of Egyptian Bedouins intangible cultural heritage

The Bedouins of Egypt hold a unique intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with distinct cultural values and social practices that are rapidly changing as a consequence of having settled after having been nomadic for centuries. We present our attempt to develop a bottom-up approach to document Bedouin ICH. Grounded in participatory design practices, the project purpose was two-fold: engaging Egyptian Engineering undergraduates with culturally-distant technology users and introducing digital self-documentation of ICH to the Bedouin community. We report the design of a didactic model that deployed the students as research partners to co-design four prototypes of ICH documentation mobile applications with the community. The prototypes reflected an advanced understanding for the values to the Bedouins brought by digital documentation practices. Drawing from our experience, three recommendations were elicited for similar ICH projects. Namely, focusing on the community benefits; promoting motivation ownership, and authenticity; and pursuing a shared identity between designers and community members. These guidelines hold a strong value as they have been tested against local challenges that could have been detrimental to the project

Evolution of Online User Behavior During a Social Upheaval

Social media represent powerful tools of mass communication and information diffusion. They played a pivotal role during recent social uprisings and political mobilizations across the world. Here we present a study of the Gezi Park movement in Turkey through the lens of Twitter. We analyze over 2.3 million tweets produced during the 25 days of protest occurred between May and June 2013. We first characterize the spatio-temporal nature of the conversation about the Gezi Park demonstrations, showing that similarity in trends of discussion mirrors geographic cues. We then describe the characteristics of the users involved in this conversation and what roles they played. We study how roles and individual influence evolved during the period of the upheaval. This analysis reveals that the conversation becomes more democratic as events unfold, with a redistribution of influence over time in the user population. We conclude by observing how the online and offline worlds are tightly intertwined, showing that exogenous events, such as political speeches or police actions, affect social media conversations and trigger changes in individual behavior.Comment: Best Paper Award at ACM Web Science 201

Measuring the effect of customer relationship management (CRM) components on the non financial performance of commercial banks: Egypt case

This paper presents customer relationship management (CRM) components as applied on the Egyptian Commercial Banks, examined from the bankers' point of view. Then, it intends to measure their effect on the level of customer satisfaction and loyalty from the customers’ point of view as examples of the non financial performance measures. The paper is quantitative in nature and consists of two different structured questionnaires using convenience/quota sampling. The first involved 180 employees in order to measure CRM applicability, and the second involved 270 customers to measure the level of customer satisfaction and loyalty and their effect on the Egyptian Commercial Banks' financial performance The findings show that the selected banks apply CRM components but the level of application differs from one bank to another. The results showed a significant positive relationship between CRM and customer satisfaction in the Egyptian Commercial Banks, when applying them together and not separately. In addition, there is a strong positive effect between customer satisfaction and loyalty which was reflected on the Commercial Banks' financial performance. The findings confirm the importance of studying and implementing CRM to achieve customer loyalty and improve the Egyptian Commercial Banks financial performance. Banks wishing to improve their relationships with customers need to focus on the CRM components to develop relevant and effective marketing strategies and tactics. The paper measures the CRM as a multidimensional construct as applied on the Egyptian Commercial Banks and relate it to the achievement of the ultimate goal of retaining customers to gaining a sustainable competitive advantage and achieve more profits