Solutions to Detect and Analyze Online Radicalization : A Survey

Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research shows that various platforms on the Internet (low barrier to publish content, allows anonymity, provides exposure to millions of users and a potential of a very quick and widespread diffusion of message) such as YouTube (a popular video sharing website), Twitter (an online micro-blogging service), Facebook (a popular social networking website), online discussion forums and blogosphere are being misused for malicious intent. Such platforms are being used to form hate groups, racist communities, spread extremist agenda, incite anger or violence, promote radicalization, recruit members and create virtual organi- zations and communities. Automatic detection of online radicalization is a technically challenging problem because of the vast amount of the data, unstructured and noisy user-generated content, dynamically changing content and adversary behavior. There are several solutions proposed in the literature aiming to combat and counter cyber-hate and cyber-extremism. In this survey, we review solutions to detect and analyze online radicalization. We review 40 papers published at 12 venues from June 2003 to November 2011. We present a novel classification scheme to classify these papers. We analyze these techniques, perform trend analysis, discuss limitations of existing techniques and find out research gaps

Using Comparable Corpora to Augment Statistical Machine Translation Models in Low Resource Settings

Previously, statistical machine translation (SMT) models have been estimated from parallel corpora, or pairs of translated sentences. In this thesis, we directly incorporate comparable corpora into the estimation of end-to-end SMT models. In contrast to parallel corpora, comparable corpora are pairs of monolingual corpora that have some cross-lingual similarities, for example topic or publication date, but that do not necessarily contain any direct translations. Comparable corpora are more readily available in large quantities than parallel corpora, which require significant human effort to compile. We use comparable corpora to estimate machine translation model parameters and show that doing so improves performance in settings where a limited amount of parallel data is available for training. The major contributions of this thesis are the following: * We release ‘language packs’ for 151 human languages, which include bilingual dictionaries, comparable corpora of Wikipedia document pairs, comparable corpora of time-stamped news text that we harvested from the web, and, for non-roman script languages, dictionaries of name pairs, which are likely to be transliterations. * We present a novel technique for using a small number of example word translations to learn a supervised model for bilingual lexicon induction which takes advantage of a wide variety of signals of translation equivalence that can be estimated over comparable corpora. * We show that using comparable corpora to induce new translations and estimate new phrase table feature functions improves end-to-end statistical machine translation performance for low resource language pairs as well as domains. * We present a novel algorithm for composing multiword phrase translations from multiple unigram translations and then use comparable corpora to prune the large space of hypothesis translations. We show that these induced phrase translations improve machine translation performance beyond that of component unigrams. This thesis focuses on critical low resource machine translation settings, where insufficient parallel corpora exist for training statistical models. We experiment with both low resource language pairs and low resource domains of text. We present results from our novel error analysis methodology, which show that most translation errors in low resource settings are due to unseen source language words and phrases and unseen target language translations. We also find room for fixing errors due to how different translations are weighted, or scored, in the models. We target both error types; we use comparable corpora to induce new word and phrase translations and estimate novel translation feature scores. Our experiments show that augmenting baseline SMT systems with new translations and features estimated over comparable corpora improves translation performance significantly. Additionally, our techniques expand the applicability of statistical machine translation to those language pairs for which zero parallel text is available

COSPO/CENDI Industry Day Conference

The conference's objective was to provide a forum where government information managers and industry information technology experts could have an open exchange and discuss their respective needs and compare them to the available, or soon to be available, solutions. Technical summaries and points of contact are provided for the following sessions: secure products, protocols, and encryption; information providers; electronic document management and publishing; information indexing, discovery, and retrieval (IIDR); automated language translators; IIDR - natural language capabilities; IIDR - advanced technologies; IIDR - distributed heterogeneous and large database support; and communications - speed, bandwidth, and wireless

The Enhancement of Arabic Information Retrieval Using Arabic Text Summarization

The massive upload of text on the internet makes the text overhead one of the important challenges faces the Information Retrieval (IR) system. The purpose of this research is to maintain reasonable relevancy and increase the efficiency of the information retrieval system by creating a short and informative inverted index and by supporting the user query with a set of semantically related terms extracted automatically. To achieve this purpose, two new models for text mining are developed and implemented, the first one called Multi-Layer Similarity (MLS) model that uses the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) in the efficient framework. And the second is called the Noun Based Distinctive Verbs (NBDV) model that investigates the semantic meanings of the nouns by identifying the set of distinctive verbs that describe them. The Arabic Language has been chosen as the language of the case study, because one of the primary objectives of this research is to measure the effect of the MLS model and NBDV model on the relevancy of the Arabic IR (AIR) systems that use the Vector Space model, and to measure the accuracy of applying the MLS model on the recall and precision of the Arabic language text extraction systems. The initiating of this research requires holding a deep reading about what has been achieved in the field of Arabic information retrieval. In this regard, a quantitative relevancy survey to measure the enhancements achieved has been established. The survey reviewed the impact of statistical and morphological analysis of Arabic text on improving the AIR relevancy. The survey measured the contributions of Stemming, Indexing, Query Expansion, Automatic Text Summarization, Text Translation, Part of Speech Tagging, and Named Entity Recognition in enhancing the relevancy of AIR. Our survey emphasized the quantitative relevancy measurements provided in the surveyed publications. The survey showed that the researchers achieved significant achievements, especially in building accurate stemmers, with precision rates that convergent to 97%, and in measuring the impact of different indexing strategies. Query expansion and Text Translation showed a positive relevancy effect. However, other tasks such as Named Entity Recognition and Automatic Text Summarization still need more research to realize their impact on Arabic IR. The use of LSA in text mining demands large space and time requirements. In the first part of this research, a new text extraction model has been proposed, designed, implemented, and evaluated. The new method sets a framework on how to efficiently employ the statistical semantic analysis in the automatic text extraction. The method hires the centrality feature that estimates the similarity of the sentence with respect to every sentence found in the text. The new model omits the segments of text that have significant verbatim, statistical, and semantic resemblance with previously processed texts. The identification of text resemblance is based on a new multi-layer process that estimates the text-similarity at three statistical layers. It employes the Jaccard coefficient similarity and the Vector Space Model (VSM) in the first and second layers respectively and uses the Latent Semantic Analysis in the third layer. Due to high time complexity, the Multi-Layer model restricts the use of the LSA layer for the text segments that the Jaccard and VSM layers failed to estimate their similarities. ROUGE tool is used in the evaluation, and because ROUGE does not consider the extract’s size, it has been supplemented with a new evaluation strategy based on the ratio of sentences intersections between the automatic and the reference extracts and the condensation rate. The MLS model has been compared with the classical LSA that uses the traditional definition of the singular value decomposition and with the traditional Jaccard and VSM text extractions. The results of our comparison showed that the run of the LSA procedure in the MLS-based extraction reduced by 52%, and the original matrix dimensions dwindled by 65%. Also, the new method achieved remarkable accuracy results. We found that combining the centrality feature with the proposed multi-layer framework yields a significant solution regarding the efficiency and precision in the field of automatic text extraction. The automatic synonym extractor built in this research is based on statistical approaches. The traditional statistical approach in synonyms extraction is time-consuming, especially in real applications such as query expansion and text mining. It is necessary to develop a new model to improve the efficiency and accuracy during the extraction. The research presents the NBDV model in synonym extraction that replaces the traditional tf.idf weighting scheme with a new weighting scheme called the Orbit Weighing Scheme (OWS). The OWS weights the verbs based on their singularity to a group of nouns. The method was manipulated over the Arabic language because it has more varieties in constructing the verbal sentences than the other languages. The results of the new method were compared with traditional models in automatic synonyms extraction, such as the Skip-Gram and Continuous Bag of Words. The NBDV method obtained significant accuracy results (47% R and 51% P in the dictionary-based evaluation, and 57.5% precision using human experts’ assessment). It is found that on average, the synonyms extraction of a single noun requires the process of 186 verbs, and in 63% of the runs, the number of singular verbs was less than 200. It is concluded that the developed new method is efficient and processed the single run in linear time complexity (O(n)). After implementing the text extractors and the synonyms extractor, the VSM model was used to build the IR system. The inverted index was constructed from two sources of data, the original documents taken from various datasets of the Arabic language (and one from the English language for comparison purposes), and from the automatic summaries of the same documents that were generated from the automatic extractors developed in this research. A series of experiments were held to test the effectiveness of the extraction methods developed in this research on the relevancy of the IR system. The experiments examined three groups of queries, 60 Arabic queries with manual relevancy assessment, 100 Arabic queries with automatic relevancy assessment, and 60 English queries with automatic relevancy assessment. Also, the experiments were performed with and without synonyms expansions using the synonyms generated by the synonyms extractor developed in the research. The positive influence of the MLS text extraction was clear in the efficiency of the IR system without noticeable loss in the relevancy results. The intrinsic evaluation in our research showed that the bag of words models failed to reduce the text size, and this appears clearly in the large values of the condensation Rate (68%). Comparing with the previous publications that addressed the use of summaries as a source of the index, The relevancy assessment of our work was higher than their relevancy results. And, the relevancy results were obtained at 42% condensation rate, whereas, the relevancy results in the previous publication achieved at high values of condensation rate. Also, the MLS-based retrieval constructed an inverted index that is 58% smaller than the Main Corpus inverted index. The influence of the NBDV synonyms expansion on the IR relevancy had a slightly positive impact (only 1% improvement in both recall and precision), but no negative impact has been recorded in all relevancy measures

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT

Anaphora resolution for Arabic machine translation :a case study of nafs

PhD ThesisIn the age of the internet, email, and social media there is an increasing need for processing online information, for example, to support education and business. This has led to the rapid development of natural language processing technologies such as computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data mining. As a branch of computational linguistics, anaphora resolution has attracted much interest. This is reflected in the large number of papers on the topic published in journals such as Computational Linguistics. Mitkov (2002) and Ji et al. (2005) have argued that the overall quality of anaphora resolution systems remains low, despite practical advances in the area, and that major challenges include dealing with real-world knowledge and accurate parsing. This thesis investigates the following research question: can an algorithm be found for the resolution of the anaphor nafs in Arabic text which is accurate to at least 90%, scales linearly with text size, and requires a minimum of knowledge resources? A resolution algorithm intended to satisfy these criteria is proposed. Testing on a corpus of contemporary Arabic shows that it does indeed satisfy the criteria.Egyptian Government

Enhancing disaster situational awareness through scalable curation of social media

Online social media is today used during humanitarian disasters by victims, responders, journalists and others, to publicly exchange accounts of ongoing events, requests for help, aggregate reports, reflections and commentary. In many cases, incident reports become available on social media before being picked up by traditional information channels, and often include rich evidence such as photos and video recordings. However, individual messages are sparse in content and message inflow rates can reach hundreds of thousands of items per hour during large scale events. Current information management methods struggle to make sense of this vast body of knowledge, due to limitations in terms of accuracy and scalability of processing, summarization capabilities, organizational acceptance and even basic understanding of users’ needs. If solutions to these problems can be found, social media can be mined to offer disaster responders unprecedented levels of situational awareness. This thesis provides a first comprehensive overview of humanitarian disaster stakeholders and their information needs, against which the utility of the proposed and future information management solutions can be assessed. The research then shows how automated online textclustering techniques can provide report de-duplication, timely event detection, ranking and summarization of content in rapid social media streams. To identify and filter out reports that correspond to the information needs of specific stakeholders, crowdsourced information extraction is combined with supervised classification techniques to generalize human annotation behaviour and scale up processing capacity several orders of magnitude. These hybrid processing techniques are implemented in CrisisTracker, a novel software tool, and evaluated through deployment in a large-scale multi-language disaster information management setting. Evaluation shows that the proposed techniques can effectively make social media an accessible complement to currently relied-on information collection methods, which enables disaster analysts to detect and comprehend unfolding events more quickly, deeply and with greater coverage.Actualmente, m´ıdias sociais s˜ao utilizadas em crises humanit´arias por v´ıtimas, apoios de emergˆencia, jornalistas e outros, para partilhar publicamente eventos, pedidos ajuda, relat´orios, reflex˜oes e coment´arios. Frequentemente, relat´orios de incidentes est˜ao dispon´ıveis nestes servic¸o muito antes de estarem dispon´ıveis nos canais de informac¸˜ao comuns e incluem recursos adicionais, tais como fotografia e video. No entanto, mensagens individuais s˜ao escassas em conteu´do e o fluxo destas pode chegar aos milhares de unidades por hora durante grandes eventos. Actualmente, sistemas de gest˜ao de informac¸˜ao s˜ao ineficientes, em grande parte devido a limita¸c˜oes em termos de rigor e escalabilidade de processamento, sintetiza¸c˜ao, aceitac¸˜ao organizacional ou simplesmente falta de compreens˜ao das necessidades dos utilizadores. Se existissem solu¸c˜oes eficientes para extrair informa¸c˜ao de m´ıdias sociais em tempos de crise, apoios de emergˆencia teriam acesso a informac¸˜ao rigorosa, resultando em respostas mais eficientes. Esta tese cont´em a primeira lista exaustiva de parte interessada em ajuda humanit´aria e suas necessidades de informa¸c˜ao, v´alida para a utilizac¸˜ao do sistema proposto e futuras soluc¸˜oes. A investiga¸c˜ao nesta tese demonstra que sistemas de aglomera¸c˜ao de texto autom´atico podem remover redundˆancia de termos; detectar eventos; ordenar por relevˆancia e sintetizar conteu´do dinˆamico de m´ıdias sociais. Para identificar e filtrar relat´orios relevantes para diversos parte interessada, algoritmos de inteligˆencia artificial s˜ao utilizados para generalizar anotac¸˜oes criadas por utilizadores e automatizar consideravelmente o processamento. Esta solu¸c˜ao inovadora, CrisisTracker, foi testada em situa¸c˜oes de grande escala, em diversas l´ınguas, para gest˜ao de informa¸c˜ao em casos de crise humanit´aria. Os resultados demonstram que os m´etodos propostos podem efectivamente tornar a informa¸c˜ao de m´ıdias sociais acess´ıvel e complementam os m´etodos actuais utilizados para gest˜ao de informa¸c˜ao por analistas de crises, para detectar e compreender eventos eficientemente, com maior detalhe e cobertura