A FRAMEWORK FOR ARABIC SENTIMENT ANALYSIS USING MACHINE LEARNING CLASSIFIERS

International audienceIn recent years, the use of Internet and online comments, expressed in natural language text, have increased significantly. However, it is difficult for humans to read all these comments and classify them appropriately. Consequently, an automatic approach is required to classify the unstructured data. In this paper, we propose a framework for Arabic language comprising of three steps: pre-processing, feature extraction and machine learning classification. The main aim of the proposed framework is to exploit the combination of different Arabic linguistic features. We evaluate the framework using two benchmark Arabic tweets datasets (ASTD, ATA), which enable sentiment polarity detection in general Arabic and Jordanian dialects. Comparative simulation results show that machine learning classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes, MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) and Logistic Regression-based produce the best performance by using a combination of n-gram features from Arabic tweets datasets. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed framework using an Ensemble classifier approach, with promising results

Dynamic user profiles for web personalisation

Web personalisation systems are used to enhance the user experience by providing tailor-made services based on the user’s interests and preferences which are typically stored in user profiles. For such systems to remain effective, the profiles need to be able to adapt and reflect the users’ changing behaviour. In this paper, we introduce a set of methods designed to capture and track user interests and maintain dynamic user profiles within a personalisation system. User interests are represented as ontological concepts which are constructed by mapping web pages visited by a user to a reference ontology and are subsequently used to learn short-term and long-term interests. A multi-agent system facilitates and coordinates the capture, storage, management and adaptation of user interests. We propose a search system that utilises our dynamic user profile to provide a personalised search experience. We present a series of experiments that show how our system can effectively model a dynamic user profile and is capable of learning and adapting to different user browsing behaviours

Comparing Oversampling Techniques to Handle the Class Imbalance Problem: A Customer Churn Prediction Case Study

Customer retention is a major issue for various service-based organizations particularly telecom industry, wherein predictive models for observing the behavior of customers are one of the great instruments in customer retention process and inferring the future behavior of the customers. However, the performances of predictive models are greatly affected when the real-world data set is highly imbalanced. A data set is called imbalanced if the samples size from one class is very much smaller or larger than the other classes. The most commonly used technique is over/under sampling for handling the class-imbalance problem (CIP) in various domains. In this paper, we survey six well-known sampling techniques and compare the performances of these key techniques, i.e., mega-trend diffusion function (MTDF), synthetic minority oversampling technique, adaptive synthetic sampling approach, couples top-N reverse k-nearest neighbor, majority weighted minority oversampling technique, and immune centroids oversampling technique. Moreover, this paper also reveals the evaluation of four rules-generation algorithms (the learning from example module, version 2 (LEM2), covering, exhaustive, and genetic algorithms) using publicly available data sets. The empirical results demonstrate that the overall predictive performance of MTDF and rules-generation based on genetic algorithms performed the best as compared with the rest of the evaluated oversampling methods and rule-generation algorithms

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis: State of the Art and Independent Comparison of Techniques

With the advent of Internet, people actively express their opinions about products, services, events, political parties, etc., in social media, blogs, and website comments. The amount of research work on sentiment analysis is growing explosively. However, the majority of research efforts are devoted to English-language data, while a great share of information is available in other languages. We present a state-of-the-art review on multilingual sentiment analysis. More importantly, we compare our own implementation of existing approaches on common data. Precision observed in our experiments is typically lower than the one reported by the original authors, which we attribute to the lack of detail in the original presentation of those approaches. Thus, we compare the existing works by what they really offer to the reader, including whether they allow for accurate implementation and for reliable reproduction of the reported results

Novel Deep Convolutional Neural Network-Based Contextual Recognition of Arabic Handwritten Scripts

Offline Arabic Handwriting Recognition (OAHR) has recently become instrumental in the areas of pattern recognition and image processing due to its application in several fields, such as office automation and document processing. However, OAHR continues to face several challenges, including the high variability of the Arabic script and its intrinsic characteristics such as cursiveness, ligatures, and diacritics, the unlimited variation in human handwriting, and the lack of large public databases. In this paper, we have introduced a novel context-aware model based on deep neural networks to address the challenges of recognizing offline handwritten Arabic text, including isolated digits, characters, and words. Specifically, we have proposed a supervised Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that contextually extracts optimal features and employs batch normalization and dropout regularization parameters to prevent overfitting and further enhance its generalization performance when compared to conventional deep learning models. We employed numerous deep stacked-convolutional layers to design the proposed Deep CNN (DCNN) architecture. The proposed model was extensively evaluated, and it was observed to achieve excellent classification accuracy when compared to the existing state-of-the-art OAHR approaches on a diverse set of six benchmark databases, including MADBase (Digits), CMATERDB (Digits), HACDB (Characters), SUST-ALT (Digits), SUST-ALT (Characters), and SUST-ALT (Names). Further comparative experiments were conducted on the respective databases using the pre-trained VGGNet-19 and Mobile-Net models; additionally, generalization capabilities experiments on another language database (i.e., MNIST English Digits) were conducted, which showed the superiority of the proposed DCNN model

Modelling dynamic and contextual user profiles for personalized services

During the last few years the Internet and the WWW have become a major source of information as well as an essential platform for mass media, communication, e-commerce and entertainment. This expansion has led to information overload so finding or searching for relevant information has become more and more challenging. Personalization and recommender systems have been widely used during the past few years to overcome this information overload problem. The main objective of these systems is to learn user interests and then provide a personalized experience to each user accordingly. However; as information on the WWVV increases, so do users' demands: web personalization systems need to provide users not only with recommendations for relevant information, but also provide these recommendations in the right situation. However, when examining the current works in the personalization field, we can see that there is a limitation in providing a generic personalization system that can model dynamic and contextual profiles to provide more intelligent personalized services. Most of the current systems are not able to adapt to user frequent changing behaviours, and ignore the fact that users might have different preferences in different situations and contexts. Aiming to address these limitations in current personalization systems, this thesis focuses on the aspects of modelling conceptual user profiles that are dynamic and contextual in a content-based platform. The novelty is in the way that these profiles are learnt, adapted, exploited and integrated to infer not just highly relevant items, but also provide such items in the right situation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Semantic Ontology-Based Approach to Enhance Arabic Text Classification

Text classification is a process of classifying textual contents to a set of predefined classes and categories. As enormous numbers of documents and contextual contents are introduced every day on the Internet, it becomes essential to use text classification techniques for different purposes such as enhancing search retrieval and recommendation systems. A lot of work has been done to study different aspects of English text classification techniques. However, little attention has been devoted to study Arabic text classification due to the difficulty of processing Arabic language. Consequently, in this paper, we propose an enhanced Arabic topic-discovery architecture (EATA) that can use ontology to provide an effective Arabic topic classification mechanism. We have introduced a semantic enhancement model to improve Arabic text classification and the topic discovery technique by utilizing the rich semantic information in Arabic ontology. We rely in this study on the vector space model (term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF)) as well as the cosine similarity approach to classify new Arabic textual documents

Utilizing contextual ontological user profiles for personalized recommendations

As users may have different needs in different situations and contexts, it is increasingly important to consider user context data when filtering information. In the field of web personalization and recommender systems, most of the studies have focused on the process of modelling user profiles and the personalization process in order to provide personalized services to the user, but not on contextualized services. Rather limited attention has been paid to investigate how to discover, model, exploit and integrate context information in personalization systems in a generic way. In this paper, we aim at providing a novel model to build, exploit and integrate context information with a web personalization system. A context-aware personalization system (CAPS) is developed which is able to model and build contextual and personalized ontological user profiles based on the user’s interests and context information. These profiles are then exploited in order to infer and provide contextual recommendations to users. The methods and system developed are evaluated through a user study which shows that considering context information in web personalization systems can provide more effective personalization services and offer better recommendations to users

A Multi-agent System Using Ontological User Profiles for Dynamic User Modelling

A key feature in developing an effective web personalization system is to build and model dynamic user profiles. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent approach for building a dynamic user profile that is effectively capable of learning and adapting to user behaviour. The main goal is to implicitly track user browsing behaviour in order to extract short-term and long-term user interests. User interests are represented as ontological concepts which are constructed by mapping web pages visited by a user to a reference ontology. In this paper, we focus on the learning and the adaptation processes that are essential in modelling a dynamic user profile. Our proposed model has been integrated with a personalized search system and experiments show that our system is able to effectively model a dynamic user profile that is capable of learning and adapting to user behaviour. Experiments also show that our model achieved a higher performance than non-personalized system. © 2011 IEEE

Using User Personalized Ontological Profile to Infer Semantic Knowledge for Personalized Recommendation

A key feature in developing an effective web personalization system is to build and model a dynamic user profiles. In this paper, we propose a novel method to construct user personalized ontological profiles based on each user's interests and view. We also propose an Enhanced Spreading Activation Technique (ESAT) to infer and recommend new items to a user based on each user's personalized ontological profile. Using the MovieLens dataset, we show that our approach achieves the highest prediction accuracy, and outperforms other recommendation approaches that were proposed in the literature. © 2011 Springer-Verlag