Khaled Shaalan

Opinion Mining is a raising research field of interest, with its different applications derived by market needs
to analyze product reviews or to assess the public opinion, for political reasons, during presidential campaigns. In this paper, we address an approach for improving accuracy of Opinion Mining in Arabic. In order to conduct our study we need Arabic linguistic resources for opinion mining. Investigating the available resources we found that the OCA corpus is available and sufficient to prove our approach. Experimental results showed that applying different parameters of the machine learning classifiers on the OCA corpus leads to increasing the accuracy of the Arabic Opinion Mining.

As more and more Arabic textual information becomes available through the Web in homes and businesses, via Internet and Intranet services, there is an urgent need for technologies and tools to process the relevant information. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an Information Extraction task that has become an integral part of many other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as Machine Translation and Information Retrieval. Arabic NER has begun to receive attention in recent years. The characteristics and peculiarities of Arabic, a member of the Semitic languages family, make dealing with NER a challenge. The performance of an Arabic NER component affects the overall performance of the NLP system in a positive manner. This article attempts to describe and detail the recent increase in interest and progress made in Arabic NER research. The importance of the NER task is demonstrated, the main characteristics of the Arabic language are highlighted, and the aspects of standardization in annotating named entities are illustrated. Moreover, the different Arabic linguistic resources are presented and the approaches used in Arabic NER field are explained. The features of common tools used in Arabic NER are described, and standard evaluation metrics are illustrated. In addition, a review of the state of the art of Arabic NER research is discussed. Finally, we present our conclusions. Throughout the presentation, illustrative examples are used for clarification.As more and more Arabic textual information becomes available through the Web in homes and businesses, via Internet and Intranet services, there is an urgent need for technologies and tools to process the relevant information. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an Information Extraction task that has become an integral part of many other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as Machine Translation and Information Retrieval. Arabic NER has begun to receive attention in recent years. The characteristics and peculiarities of Arabic, a member of the Semitic languages family, make dealing with NER a challenge. The performance of an Arabic NER component affects the overall performance of the NLP system in a positive manner. This article attempts to describe and detail the recent increase in interest and progress made in Arabic NER research. The importance of the NER task is demonstrated, the main characteristics of the Arabic language are highlighted, and the aspects of standardization in annotating named entities are illustrated. Moreover, the different Arabic linguistic resources are presented and the approaches used in Arabic NER field are explained. The features of common tools used in Arabic NER are described, and standard evaluation metrics are illustrated. In addition, a review of the state of the art of Arabic NER research is discussed. Finally, we present our conclusions. Throughout the presentation, illustrative examples are used for clarification.

Arabic Person Name Recognition has been tackled mostly using either of two approaches: a rule-based or Machine Learning (ML) based approach, with their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, the problem of Arabic Person Name Recognition is tackled through integrating the two approaches together in a pipelined process to create a hybrid system with the aim of enhancing the overall performance of Person Name Recognition tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted using three different ML classifiers to evaluate the overall performance of the hybrid system. The empirical results indicate that the hybrid approach outperforms both the rule-based and the ML-based approaches. Moreover, our system outperforms the state-of-the-art of Arabic Person Name Recognition in terms of accuracy when applied to ANERcorp dataset, with precision 0.949, recall 0.942 and f-measure 0.945.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to recognize and classify named entities in unstructured text into predefined categories such as the names of persons, organizations, locations, etc. The majority of researchers used machine learning, while few researchers used handcrafted rules to solve the NER problem. We focus here on NER for the Arabic language (NERA), an important language with its own distinct challenges. This paper proposes a simple method for integrating machine learning with rule-based systems and implement this proposal using the state-of-the-art rule-based system for NERA. Experimental evaluation shows that our integrated approach increases the F-measure by 8 to 14% when compared to the original (pure) rule based system and the (pure) machine learning approach, and the improvement is statistically significant for different datasets. More importantly, our system outperforms the state-of-the-art machine-learning system in NERA over a benchmark dataset.