Mohammed Al-Kabi

Benchmarking and assessing the performance of Arabic stemmers

Previous studies on the stemming of the Arabic language lack fair evaluation, full description of algorithms used or access to the source code of the stemmers and the datasets used to evaluate such stemmers. Freeing source codes and datasets is an essential step to enable researchers to enhance stemmers currently in use and to verify the results of these studies. This study laid the foundation of establishing a benchmark for Arabic stemmers and presents an evaluation of four heavy (root-based) stemmers for the Arabic language. The evaluation aims to assess the accuracy of each of the four stemmers and to show the strength of each. The four algorithms are: Al-Mustafa stemmer, Al-Sarhan stemmer, Rabab’ah stemmer and Taghva stemmer. The accuracy and strength tests used in this study ranked Rabab’ah stemmer as the first followed by Al-Sarhan, Al-Mustafa, and Taghva stemmers respectively.

The Effect of Stemming on Arabic Text Classification: An Empirical Study

The information world is rich of documents in different formats or applications, such as databases, digital libraries, and the Web. Text classification is used for aiding search functionality offered by search engines and information retrieval systems to deal with the large number of documents on the web. Many research papers, conducted within the field of text classification, were applied to English, Dutch, Chinese, and other languages, whereas fewer were applied to Arabic language. This paper addresses the issue of automatic classification or classification of Arabic text documents. It applies text classification to Arabic language text documents using stemming as part of the preprocessing steps. Results have showed that applying text classification without using stemming; the support vector machine SVM classifier has achieved the highest classification accuracy using the two test modes with 87.79% and 88.54%. On the other hand, stemming has negatively affected the accuracy, where the SVM accuracy using the two test modes dropped down to 84.49% and 86.35%.

Content-based analysis to detect Arabic web spam

Search engines are important outlets for information query and retrieval. They have to deal with the continual increase of information available on the web, and provide users with convenient access to such huge amounts of information. Furthermore, with this huge amount of information, a more complex challenge that continuously gets more and more difficult to illuminate is the spam in web pages. For several reasons, web spammers try to intrude in the search results and inject artificially biased results in favour of their websites or pages. Spam pages are added to the internet on a daily basis, thus making it difficult for search engines to keep up with the fast-growing and dynamic nature of the web, especially since spammers tend to add more keywords to their websites to deceive the search engines and increase the rank of their pages. In this research, we have investigated four different classification algorithms (naïve Bayes, decision tree, SVM and K-NN) to detect Arabic web spam pages, based on content. The three groups of datasets used, with 1%, 15% and 50% spam contents, were collected using a crawler that was customized for this study. Spam pages were classified manually. Different tests and comparisons have revealed that the Decision Tree was the best classifier for this purpose.

Studying the Impact of Using Multimedia Interactive Programs on Children's Ability to Learn Basic Math Skills.

The continuous inventions and evolutions in all information technology fields open new channels and opportunities to enhance teaching and educational methods. On one side, these may improve the abilities of educators to present information in interactive and media-enhanced formats relative to traditional methods. This may help students or learners through offering them the information in channels and methods that can be easier to understand, deal with and retrieve. On the other hand, offering those alternative methods of teaching can be helpful particularly for children, people with special needs, or students in rural areas where they can have virtual or remote instructors, especially for majors who have shortages. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of utilising multimedia technologies on enhancing, or not, the effectiveness of teaching students at early stages in Jordanian primary schools. To achieve this objective, a program has been developed to test the students ability to understand basic mathematical knowledge and skills. Two groups were selected from a local school based on their own class distribution, where one group was taught the subject in basic math using a program developed for this purpose and the second class was taught the same subject using traditional methods of teaching (i.e. direct student-to-child instruction, board, etc.). Results showed that in such math skills at this age, using programs or multimedia-enhanced methods of teaching can be effective in getting students attention, especially when cartoon characters are used. Results also showed that there is no significant difference in learning and knowledge skills and information absorption based on gender distribution, as a comparison of the results between little boys and girls showed no significant difference in their learning skills.

Designing an interactive multimedia learning system for the children of primary schools in Jordan

With the introduction of the Internet, and several new inventions and technologies especially in the communication and computer systems field, there is a need to enhance teaching and educational methods through the utilization of those technologies which may improve the abilities of educators to present information in an interactive and media enhanced formats relative to traditional methods. This may help students or learners through offering them the information in channels and methods that can be easier to understand, deal with, and retrieve.

Evaluating Arabic spam classifiers using link analysis

The rank of pages within the search engine results page (SERP) is important especially for commercial sites. It is also important for those establishments which try to be at the top 10 of SERP to gain more visitors. To be within the top 10 results of SERP means also being visible to a larger number of audiences. On the other hand, gaining a lower rank means being less visible and eventually gaining less revenues relative to competitive pages which are ranked higher. Therefore the Web has a number of pages which adopt spamming techniques to deceive search engines and gains a higher rank than what they really deserve. Link-based technique is one of the techniques used to achieve this goal. This study aims to detect the link-based spamming techniques used within Arabic spam Web pages. The conducted tests reveal that link-based spamming technique is used significantly within Arabic spammed Web pages.

A Conceptual Organization for Websites Metrics and E-Government Websites: A Case Study

E-government websites contain sensitive and important information where security and reliability are crucial. However, due to the large number of visitors, they are expected to be user friendly and provide services quickly. There are several methods to evaluate websites. Quality attributes of a website depend on several characteristics such as: its domain, type of information, and services it provides. This paper examines several e-government websites in Jordan for a comprehensive list of possible metrics, attributes and tools for evaluating websites. Websites and tools that can gather the described metrics are used to compare results. Results showed that such metrics have important information related to the overall properties and quality of those websites. This paper examines this list of metrics to evaluate e-government websites because such websites should have a combination of several high quality attributes that most other websites may not need to have. Similar to e-commerce websites, they need to provide high end quick secure services to a large number of users. Further, due to the type of sensitive data that they hold, they can be targets for a large number of hackers or invaders. Without the continuous evaluation and assessment for all required attributes such websites may fail catastrophically and cause a significant damage to data and reputation.

Arabic news: topic and novelty detection

Large number of Internet users in the Arab World uses the Internet as their main source of information. There are many news publishers and agencies that compete to gain the largest percentage of Arab visitors to their Web sites. Also these agencies received a continuous stream of news articles each day, and therefore there is a need for an automated system to identify new news items to inform the employee in these agencies about it, while this system has to neglect old news articles. This study demonstrates a novelty detection system, which used to identify the topic of each Arabic news item, besides identifying the novelty of each Arabic news item.

Enhancing query retrieval efficiency using BGIT coding

Data compression techniques are used to optimize time and space while sending and retrieving data. In information retrieval, data compression techniques are used by Search engines to reduce the size of their indexes which will result in optimizing the speed and performance of retrieving relevant information. The goal of this research project is to propose some enhancements on search engines indexing using Bigram index term coding. Evaluation of the improvements on search-engine performance resulting from encoding the terms of its index is also conducted. Our experiments showed a good reduction in the size of index terms which contributes to the overall index size. It also showed a significant reduction of the number of comparisons made to process the user queries as a result of reducing the number of symbols representing each index term.

Query classification and study of university students' search trends

Purpose – This study is an attempt to develop an automatic identification method for Arabic web queries and divide them into several query types using data mining. In addition, it seeks to evaluate the impact of the academic environment on using the internet.Design/methodology/approach – The web log files were collected from one of the higher institutes servers over a one‐month period. A special program was designed and implemented to extract web search queries from these files and also to automatically classify Arabic queries into three query types (i.e. Navigational, Transactional, and Informational queries) based on predefined specifications for each type.Findings – The results indicate that students are slowly and gradually using the internet for more relevant academic purposes. Tests showed that it is possible to automatically classify Arabic queries based on query terms, with 80.6 per cent to 80.2 per cent accuracy for the two phases of the test respectively. In their future strategies, Jordanian u...