Word embeddings are a core component of modern natural language processing systems, making the ability to thoroughly evaluate them a vital task. We describe DiaLex, a benchmark for intrinsic evaluation of dialectal Arabic word embeddings. DiaLex covers five important Arabic dialects: Algerian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Tunisian. Across these dialects, DiaLex provides a testbank for six syntactic and semantic relations, namely male to female, singular to dual, singular to plural, antonym, comparative, and genitive to past tense. DiaLex thus consists of a collection of word pairs representing each of the six relations in each of the five dialects. To demonstrate the utility of DiaLex, we use it to evaluate a set of existing and new Arabic word embeddings that we developed. Beyond evaluation of word embeddings, DiaLex supports efforts to integrate dialects into the Arabic language curriculum. It can be easily translated into Modern Standard Arabic and English, which can be useful for evaluating word translation. Our benchmark, evaluation code, and new word embedding models will be publicly available.

Word embeddings have proven to be an effective method for capturing semantic relations among distinct terms within a large corpus. In this paper, we present a set of word embeddings learnt from three large Lebanese news archives, which collectively consist of 609,386 scanned newspaper images and spanning a total of 151 years, ranging from 1933 till 2011. The diversified ideological nature of the news archives alongside the temporal variability of the embeddings offer a rare glimpse onto the variation of word representation across the left-right political spectrum. To train the word embeddings, Google’s Tesseract 4.0 OCR engine was employed to transcribe the scanned news archives, and various archive-level as well as decade-level word embeddings were learnt. To evaluate the accuracy of the learnt word embeddings, a benchmark of analogy tasks was used. Finally, we demonstrate an interactive system that allows the end user to visualize for a given word of interest, the variation of the top-k closest words in the embedding space as a function of time and across news archives using an animated scatter plot.

Named entity recognition (NER) plays a significant role in many applications such as information extraction, information retrieval, question answering, and even machine translation. Most of the work on NER using deep learning was done for non-Arabic languages like English and French, and only few studies focused on Arabic. This paper proposes a semi-supervised learning approach to train a BERT-based NER model using labeled and semi-labeled datasets. We compared our approach against various baselines, and state-of-the-art Arabic NER tools on three datasets: AQMAR, NEWS, and TWEETS. We report a significant improvement in F-measure for the AQMAR and the NEWS datasets, which are written in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and competitive results for the TWEETS dataset, which contains tweets that are mostly in the Egyptian dialect and contain many mistakes or misspellings.

Assessing the credibility of online content has garnered a lot of attention lately. We focus on one such type of online content, namely weblogs or blogs for short. Some recent work attempted the task of automatically assessing the credibility of blogs, typically via machine learning. However, in the case of Arabic blogs, there are hardly any datasets available that can be used to train robust machine learning models for this difficult task. To overcome the lack of sufficient training data, we propose deep co-learning, a semi-supervised end-to-end deep learning approach to assess the credibility of Arabic blogs. In deep co-learning, multiple weak deep neural network classifiers are trained using a small labeled dataset, and each using a different view of the data. Each one of these classifiers is then used to classify unlabeled data, and its prediction is used to train the other classifiers in a semi-supervised fashion. We evaluate our deep co-learning approach on an Arabic blogs dataset, and we report significant improvements in performance compared to many baselines including fully-supervised deep learning models as well as ensemble models.

Data generated on Twitter has become a rich source for various data mining tasks. Those data analysis tasks that are dependent on the tweet semantics, such as sentiment analysis, emotion mining, and rumor detection among others, suffer considerably if the tweet is not credible, not real, or spam. In this paper, we perform an extensive analysis on credibility of Arabic content on Twitter. We also build a classification model (CAT) to automatically predict the credibility of a given Arabic tweet. Of particular originality is the inclusion of features extracted directly or indirectly from the author’s profile and timeline. To train and test CAT, we annotated for credibility a data set of 9,000 Arabic tweets that are topic independent. CAT achieved consistent improvements in predicting the credibility of the tweets when compared to several baselines and when compared to the state-of-the-art approach with an improvement of 21% in weighted average F-measure. We also conducted experiments to highlight the importance of the user-based features as opposed to the content-based features. We conclude our work with a feature reduction experiment that highlights the best indicative features of credibility.

Many unsupervised learning techniques have been proposed to obtain meaningful representations of words from text. In this study, we evaluate these various techniques when used to generate Arabic word embeddings. We first build a benchmark for the Arabic language that can be utilized to perform intrinsic evaluation of different word embeddings. We then perform additional extrinsic evaluations of the embeddings based on two NLP tasks.

We demonstrate TopoText, an interactive tool for digital mapping of literary text. TopoText takes as input a literary piece of text such as a novel or a biography article and automatically extracts all place names in the text. The identified places are then geoparsed and displayed on an interactive map. TopoText calculates the number of times a place was mentioned in the text, which is then reflected on the map allowing the end-user to grasp the importance of the different places within the text. It also displays the most frequent words mentioned within a specified proximity of a place name in context or across the entire text. This can also be faceted according to part of speech tags. Finally, TopoText keeps the human in the loop by allowing the end-user to disambiguate places and to provide specific place annotations. All extracted information such as geolocations, place frequencies, as well as all user-provided annotations can be automatically exported as a CSV file that can be imported later by the same user or other users.