A Machine Learning Approach For Opinion Holder Extraction In Arabic Language

Opinion mining aims at extracting useful subjective information from reliable amounts of text. Opinion mining holder recognition is a task that has not been considered yet in Arabic Language. This task essentially requires deep understanding of clauses structures. Unfortunately, the lack of a robust, publicly available, Arabic parser further complicates the research. This paper presents a leading research for the opinion holder extraction in Arabic news independent from any lexical parsers. We investigate constructing a comprehensive feature set to compensate the lack of parsing structural outcomes. The proposed feature set is tuned from English previous works coupled with our proposed semantic field and named entities features. Our feature analysis is based on Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and semi-supervised pattern recognition techniques. Different research models are evaluated via cross-validation experiments achieving 54.03 F-measure. We publicly release our own research outcome corpus and lexicon for opinion mining community to encourage further research

A New Email Retrieval Ranking Approach

Email Retrieval task has recently taken much attention to help the user retrieve the email(s) related to the submitted query. Up to our knowledge, existing email retrieval ranking approaches sort the retrieved emails based on some heuristic rules, which are either search clues or some predefined user criteria rooted in email fields. Unfortunately, the user usually does not know the effective rule that acquires best ranking related to his query. This paper presents a new email retrieval ranking approach to tackle this problem. It ranks the retrieved emails based on a scoring function that depends on crucial email fields, namely subject, content, and sender. The paper also proposes an architecture to allow every user in a network/group of users to be able, if permissible, to know the most important network senders who are interested in his submitted query words. The experimental evaluation on Enron corpus prove that our approach outperforms known email retrieval ranking approachesComment: 20 page

Leveraging Time Series Data in Similarity Based Healthcare Predictive Models: The Case of Early ICU Mortality Prediction

Patient time series classification faces challenges in high degrees of dimensionality and missingness. In light of patient similarity theory, this study explores effective temporal feature engineering and reduction, missing value imputation, and change point detection methods that can afford similarity-based classification models with desirable accuracy enhancement. We select a piecewise aggregation approximation method to extract fine-grain temporal features and propose a minimalist method to impute missing values in temporal features. For dimensionality reduction, we adopt a gradient descent search method for feature weight assignment. We propose new patient status and directional change definitions based on medical knowledge or clinical guidelines about the value ranges for different patient status levels, and develop a method to detect change points indicating positive or negative patient status changes. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in the context of early Intensive Care Unit mortality prediction. The evaluation results show that the k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm that incorporates methods we select and propose significantly outperform the relevant benchmarks for early ICU mortality prediction. This study makes contributions to time series classification and early ICU mortality prediction via identifying and enhancing temporal feature engineering and reduction methods for similarity-based time series classification. Keywords: time-series classification, similarity-based classification, mortality prediction, directional change poin

Evaluation of Electronic Scholarly Journals of Al-Neelain University in Sudan According to the Scopus Database Criteria

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the online electronic scholarly journals of Al-Neelain University in Sudan according to the Scopus database criteria, with a view to investigating to what extent these journals meet the Scopus database criteria.  The study adopted the descriptive approach and case study method. The study population consisted of nine online scholarly journals all of which constituted the study sample. Data were collected by reviewing all online scholarly journals of the University. Data were then statistically analyzed using simple statistical tools and presented in tables. The findings indicated that all of Al-Neelain University online scholarly journals are compatible with Scopus criteria by 56.2%, and confirmed that the missing criteria included absence of publication ethics statement and lack of diversity in geographical distribution of editors in all journals. The study also revealed that 75% of the studied journals lack diversity in geographical distribution of authors and delays in the publication schedule, and that these journals are not available through quality websites. The study recommended the use of Scopus criteria for the development and improvement of Al-Neelain University online scholarly journals

THREE-PHASE TOURNAMENT-BASED METHOD FOR BETTER EMAIL CLASSIFICATION

ABSTRACT Email classification performance has attracted much attention in the last decades. This paper proposes a tournament-based method to evolve email classification performance utilizing World Final Cup rules as a solution heuristics. Our proposed classification method passes through three phases: 1) clustering (grouping) email folders (topics or classes) based on their token and field similarities, 2) training binary classifiers on each class pair and 3) applying 2-layer tournament method for the classifiers of the related classes in the resultant clusters. The first phase evolves K-mean algorithm to result in cluster sizes of 3, 4, or 5 email classes with the pairwise similarity function. The second phase uses two classifiers namely Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) and Winnow. The third phase uses a 2-layer tournament method which applies round robin and elimination tournament methods sequentially to realize the winner class per cluster and the winner of all clusters respectively. The proposed method is tested for various K settings against tournament and N-way methods using 10-fold cross-validation evaluation method on Enron benchmark dataset. The experiments prove that the proposed method is generally more accurate than the others

Strategic alliances in the South African independent 3 star and above hotels

This research was conducted to identify whether South African 3 star and above hotels are interested in forming alliances. The objective of this study was to group South African independent 3 star and above hotels on the alliance framework continuum, namely; cooperation, collaboration, coordination and coadunation; and to identify whether South African independent 3 star and above hotels are interested to progress from one simple form of alliance to the next complex, formal type of alliance. Hypotheses were proposed to determine the significance of the differences in preference of South African 3 star and above independent hotels. Thus, this study is descriptive in nature, to test the proposed hypotheses. An extensive investigation into the relevant literature was done. An empirical study was also conducted and the measuring instrument consisted of a selfadministered questionnaire. The population selected consisted of managers of these South African 3 star and above independent hotels. The major findings included: South African independent 3 star and above hotels seem to prefer niche personality and potential non-financial relationship, while they try to avoid economic and cultural integration with a partner firm and not interested in shared management control with the partner firm. Besides, four factors confirmed the alliance continuum developed by Bailey and Koney (2000), namely; cooperation, coordination, collaboration and coadunation. Friedman’s test indicated that there is significant difference among the different dimensions of alliance formation, namely; cooperation, collaboration, coordination and coadunation and that South African independent 3 star and above hotels are interested to form cooperation form of alliances mostly, followed by coordination form of alliances. South African independent 3 star and above hotels are neutral on whether to form collaboration type of alliances and they are not interested to involve in the coadunation form of alliances. Chi-square test indicated that there is no significant difference on the opinion of the respondents on whether the hotel they work for needs to progress from simpler form of alliances into more formal and complex format of alliances. However, those who preferred that their hotel has to progress from simpler form of alliance are higher in number than those who did not prefer. It was, inter alia, recommended that as South African 3 star and above hotels choose lower form of alliance, value chains seem the most applicable form of alliance. Hotels could share a name, reservation information and some basic IT facilities (point of sale IT reservation equipment and back office IT equipments). Finally, the study concludes by recommending that South African independent 3 star and above hotels should take alliances as an option for growth and justification of expenditures and decide the level of alliance continuum they want to engage in.Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012.Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS)unrestricte