Effective tool for exploring web: An Evaluation of Search engines

Evaluation of search engines is necessary to check the retrieval performance of search engines and to differentiate search engines from one another. The ability to retrieve and to rank the relevant result lists can be done by the process of evaluation and this process can take place in two ways viz; human based methods where one can evaluate search engines manually to calculate the significance of the returned results but this method is time consuming and expensive, while as the second is automatic method where one can make use of various techniques like retrieval measures can be used to assess the performance of search engines

Special requirements for comparative evaluation of web search engines

ABSTRACT: Performance evaluation of classical information retrieval systems usually aims to assess the ability of these systems to find documents considered relevant to a certain search query based on a specific evaluation criteria. This approach, however, is not suitable to adequately evaluate some information retrieval applications such as web search engines. The web special characteristics make information retrieval tasks and the evaluation of search engines on the web face multiple challenges. Different web-specific, user-specific and language-specific requirements should be considered when designing and performing evaluation tests on operational web search engines. This paper discusses the special requirements for comprehensive comparative evaluation of different web search engines and highlights some languagespecific considerations for evaluation in Arabic language

Measuring the relevance of retrieved images in search engines based on Persian language writing styles

The aim of this study was to investigate the image retrieval from selected search engines according to the written and semantic features of Persian language and determine their relevance using recall and precision formulas and to identify the most efficient search engine in retrieving images in Persian and by survey-analytical method. It was done using direct observation technique. After reviewing related researches, search keywords list was formed in the form of a checklist based on the written and semantic features of Persian language. Each of these keywords in the studied search engines, including two general search engines Google and Bing and Duckduckgo semantic search engine, which are among the most used search engines and have also provided the ability to search for images in Persian, search and the number of relevant and unrelated retrieved results were recorded. Then, the recall and precision of search results in each search engine were calculated and the relevance of images based on these features in each of the studied search engines was investigated. A variety of descriptive statistical techniques were applied to analyze the data along with Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Shapiro-Wilk, Kruskal-Wallis and Friedman tests. Findings demonstrated that Google, Bing and Duckduckgo search engines do not pay enough attention to the written and semantic features of Persian language and many of these features are ignored while searching and retrieving images. In the present study, Google search engine had a higher recall and precision than the other two search engines, and despite the claim of semantic search engines to provide better and more relevant information than other search engines, Duckduckgo search engine did not show good performance in retrieving images related to the written and semantic part of Persian language. There is also a significant difference between the recall and the precision of the three studied search engines

Economic consumption model revisited: infaq model based on al-Shaybani's levels of al-Kasb

This study attempts to investigate the economic ideas of al-Imām MuÍammad Ibn al-×asan al-Shaybānī (1986), focusing on his levels of al-Kasb. The study uses al-Shaybānī’s levels of al-Kasb to develop a theoretical Infāq model that integrates the material, spiritual, moral, social and legal dimensions. Thus the Infāq model is broader than the concept of consumption in modern economics. It also has some advantages over the Islamic consumption models developed by contemporary Muslim economists. The model identifies some major implications in terms of basic needs fulfillment, social Infāq and distributive justice. The primary features of this model are its simplicity and comprehensiveness. It is easy to understand yet it embodies the individual, social, material, spiritual, moral and legal dimensions into the individual’s spending decision making and behavior. The model is more realistic in understanding human behavior. It is growth friendly and instills the spirit of cooperation and social responsibility at the individual and social levels. It is suggested that future research further fine tune with some rigourous analysis JEL Classification: A13, A31, B11, D01, D10 Key words: Al-Kasb, Consumption, Infāq, Model buildin

Sentiment analysis of dialectical Arabic social media content using a hybrid linguistic-machine learning approach

Despite the enormous increase in the number of Arabic posts on social networks, the sentiment analysis research into extracting opinions from these posts lags behind that for the English language. This is largely attributed to the challenges in processing the morphologically complex Arabic natural language and the scarcity of Arabic NLP tools and resources. This complex task is further exacerbated when analysing dialectal Arabic that do not abide by the formal grammatical structure. Based on the semantic modelling of the target domain’s knowledge and multi-factor lexicon-based sentiment analysis, the intent of this research is to use a hybrid approach, integrating linguistic and machine learning methods for sentiment analysis classification of dialectal Arabic. First, a dataset of dialectal Arabic tweets was collected focusing on the unemployment domain, which is annotated manually. The tweets cover different dialectal Arabic in Saudi Arabia for which a comprehensive Arabic sentiment lexicon was constructed. This approach to sentiment analysis also integrated a novel light stemming mechanism towards improved Saudi dialectal Arabic stemming. Subsequently, a novel multi-factor lexicon-based sentiment analysis algorithm was developed for domain-specific social media posts written in dialectal Arabic. The algorithm considers several factors (emoji, intensifiers, negations, supplications) to improve the accuracy of the classifications. Applying this model to a central problem of sentiment analysis in dialectical Arabic, these operational techniques were deployed in order to assess analytical performance across social media channels which are vulnerable to semantic and colloquial variations. Finally, this study presented a new hybrid approach to sentiment analysis where domain knowledge is utilised in two methods to combine computational linguistics and machine learning; the first method integrates the problem domain semantic knowledgebase in the machine learning training features set, while the second uses the outcome of the lexicon-based sentiment classification in the training of the machine learning methods. By integrating these techniques into a single, hybridised solution, a greater degree of accuracy and consistency was achieved than applying each approach independently, confirming a pragmatic solution to sentiment classification in dialectical Arabic text

Mixed-Language Arabic- English Information Retrieval

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis attempts to address the problem of mixed querying in CLIR. It proposes mixed-language (language-aware) approaches in which mixed queries are used to retrieve most relevant documents, regardless of their languages. To achieve this goal, however, it is essential firstly to suppress the impact of most problems that are caused by the mixed-language feature in both queries and documents and which result in biasing the final ranked list. Therefore, a cross-lingual re-weighting model was developed. In this cross-lingual model, term frequency, document frequency and document length components in mixed queries are estimated and adjusted, regardless of languages, while at the same time the model considers the unique mixed-language features in queries and documents, such as co-occurring terms in two different languages. Furthermore, in mixed queries, non-technical terms (mostly those in non-English language) would likely overweight and skew the impact of those technical terms (mostly those in English) due to high document frequencies (and thus low weights) of the latter terms in their corresponding collection (mostly the English collection). Such phenomenon is caused by the dominance of the English language in scientific domains. Accordingly, this thesis also proposes reasonable re-weighted Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) so as to moderate the effect of overweighted terms in mixed queries