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The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a system called Mubser to translate Arabic and English Braille into normal text. The system can automatically detect the source language and the Braille grade.

Mubser system was designed under the MS‐Windows environment and implemented using Visual C# 2.0 with an Arabic interface. The system uses the concept of rule file to translate supported languages from Braille to text. The rule file is based on XML format. The identification of the source language and grade is based on a statistical approach.

From the literature review, the authors found that most researches and products do not support bilingual translation from Braille to text in either contracted or un‐contracted Braille. Mubser system is a robust system that fills that gap. It helps both visually impaired and sighted people, especially Arabic native speakers, to translate from Braille to text.

Mubser is being implemented and tested by the authors for both Arabic and English languages. The tests performed so far have shown excellent results. In the future, it is planned to integrate the system with an optical Braille recognition system, enhance the system to accept new languages, support maths and scientific symbols, and add spell checkers.

There is a desperate need for such system to translate Braille system into normal text. This system helps both sighted and blind people to communicate better.

This paper presents a novel system for converting Braille codes (Arabic and English) into normal text.

The aim of this paper is to experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art printed Arabic text recognition systems to determine open areas for future improvements. In addition, this paper proposes a standard protocol with a set of metrics for measuring the effectiveness of Arabic optical character recognition (OCR) systems to assist researchers in comparing different Arabic OCR approaches.

This paper describes an experiment to automatically evaluate four well-known Arabic OCR systems using a set of performance metrics. The evaluation experiment is conducted on a publicly available printed Arabic dataset comprising 240 text images with a variety of resolution levels, font types, font styles and font sizes.

The experimental results show that the field of character recognition for printed Arabic still requires further research to reach an efficient text recognition method for Arabic script.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that provides a comprehensive automated evaluation of Arabic OCR systems with respect to the characteristics of Arabic script and, in addition, proposes an evaluation methodology that can be used as a benchmark by researchers and therefore will contribute significantly to the enhancement of the field of Arabic script recognition.

This paper aims to propose a new efficient semantic recommender method for Arabic content.

Three semantic similarities were proposed to be integrated with the recommender system to improve its ability to recommend based on the semantic aspect. The proposed similarities are CHI-based semantic similarity, singular value decomposition (SVD)-based semantic similarity and Arabic WordNet-based semantic similarity. These similarities were compared with the existing similarities used by recommender systems from the literature.

Experiments show that the proposed semantic method using CHI-based similarity and using SVD-based similarity are more efficient than the existing methods on Arabic text in term of accuracy and execution time.

Although many previous works proposed recommender system methods for English text, very few works concentrated on Arabic Text. The field of Arabic Recommender Systems is largely understudied in the literature. Aside from this, there is a vital need to consider the semantic relationships behind user preferences to improve the accuracy of the recommendations. The contributions of this work are the following. First, as many recommender methods were proposed for English text and have never been tested on Arabic text, this work compares the performance of these widely used methods on Arabic text. Second, it proposes a novel semantic recommender method for Arabic text. As this method uses semantic similarity, three novel base semantic similarities were proposed and evaluated. Third, this work would direct the attention to more studies in this understudied topic in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new model to enhance auto-indexing Arabic texts. The model denotes extracting new relevant words by relating those chosen by previous classical methods to new words using data mining rules.

The proposed model uses an association rule algorithm for extracting frequent sets containing related items – to extract relationships between words in the texts to be indexed with words from texts that belong to the same category. The associations of words extracted are illustrated as sets of words that appear frequently together.

The proposed methodology shows significant enhancement in terms of accuracy, efficiency and reliability when compared to previous works.

The stemming algorithm can be further enhanced. In the Arabic language, we have many grammatical rules. The more we integrate rules to the stemming algorithm, the better the stemming will be. Other enhancements can be done to the stop-list. This is by adding more words to it that should not be taken into consideration in the indexing mechanism. Also, numbers should be added to the list as well as using the thesaurus system because it links different phrases or words with the same meaning to each other, which improves the indexing mechanism. The authors also invite researchers to add more pre-requisite texts to have better results.

In this paper, the authors present a full text-based auto-indexing method for Arabic text documents. The auto-indexing method extracts new relevant words by using data mining rules, which has not been investigated before. The method uses an association rule mining algorithm for extracting frequent sets containing related items to extract relationships between words in the texts to be indexed with words from texts that belong to the same category. The benefits of the method are demonstrated using empirical work involving several Arabic texts.

Arabic script is the most recent addition to the scripts available on the Research libraries Information Network (RLIN). Bibliographic control and retrieval using the authentic writing system are available for titles in Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Urdu, Ottoman Turkish, and other languages written with Arabic script. RLIN is the world's largest bibliographic database for Middle Eastern language material. This paper is a comprehensive description of the Arabic script features of RLIN. It covers Arabic character sets and RLIN's character repertoire for Arabic script; how Arabic characters are input and stored in the RLIN database; the equipment needed for Arabic script support; the indexing, retrieval, and presentation of records containing Arabic script; the inclusion of non‐Roman data in USMARC bibliographic records; and statistics on the RLIN databases. Sidebars explain features of Arabic writing. The discussion of data storage and presentation of text is relevant to any computer application that involves Arabic script.

The integration of the Internet in translation creates several opportunities for translators. This study aims at examining the impact of using web-based translation (WBT) on translating religious texts.

The study followed a quasi-experimental study design. Sixty students enrolled in English Department, University of Bisha, participated in this study. The participants were divided randomly into three groups (i.e. words group, sentences group and passages group). The data was collected through a translation test and a questionnaire.

The results indicated that WBT is more beneficial in translating words than translating sentences or passages. In addition, WBT is more beneficial when words are translated from English into Arabic as well as from Arabic into English. The results from the questionnaire revealed positive attitudes toward using WBT in the process of translation.

This use of technology in translation has been examined in many studies (e.g. Bundgaard et al., 2016). WBT can be used to translate any field of knowledge. One of these fields is religious translation. According to O'Connor (2021), the study of religious translation has expanded greatly in recent years from its strong textual tradition and a constant focus on equivalence and translatability. However, very little has been done to examine the impact of WBT on translating religious texts. Therefore, this study aims at exploring the impact of WBT on translating religious texts with special reference to Islamic texts.

Nowadays, there is a high demand for online services and applications. However, there is a challenge to keep these applications secured by applying different methods rather than using the traditional approaches such as passwords and usernames. Keystroke dynamics is one of the alternative authentication methods that provide high level of security in which the used keyboard plays an important role in the recognition accuracy. To guarantee the robustness of a system in different practical situations, there is a need to examine how much the performance of the system is affected by changing the keyboard layout. This paper aims to investigate the impact of using different keyboards on the recognition accuracy for Arabic free-text typing.

To evaluate how much the performance of the system is affected by changing the keyboard layout, an experimental study is conducted by using two different keyboards which are a Mac’s keyboard and an HP’s keyboard.

By using the Mac’s keyboard, the results showed that the false rejection rate (FRR) was 0.20, whilst the false acceptance rate (FAR) was 0.44. However, these values have changed when using the HP’s keyboard where the FRR was equal to 0.08 and the FAR was equal to 0.60.

The number of participants in the experiment, as the authors were targeting much more participants.

These results showed for the first time the impact of the keyboards on the system’s performance regarding the recognition accuracy when using Arabic free-text.

The present study was designed to investigate eight research questions that are related to the analysis and the detection of dialectal Arabic hate speech that targeted African refugees and illegal migrants on the YouTube Algerian space.

The transfer learning approach which recently presents the state-of-the-art approach in natural language processing tasks has been exploited to classify and detect hate speech in Algerian dialectal Arabic. Besides, a descriptive analysis has been conducted to answer the analytical research questions that aim at measuring and evaluating the presence of the anti-refugee/migrant discourse on the YouTube social platform.

Data analysis revealed that there has been a gradual modest increase in the number of anti-refugee/migrant hateful comments on YouTube since 2014, a sharp rise in 2017 and a sharp decline in later years until 2021. Furthermore, our findings stemming from classifying hate content using multilingual and monolingual pre-trained language transformers demonstrate a good performance of the AraBERT monolingual transformer in comparison with the monodialectal transformer DziriBERT and the cross-lingual transformers mBERT and XLM-R.

Automatic hate speech detection in languages other than English is quite a challenging task that the literature has tried to address by various approaches of machine learning. Although the recent approach of cross-lingual transfer learning offers a promising solution, tackling this problem in the context of the Arabic language, particularly dialectal Arabic makes it even more challenging. Our results cast a new light on the actual ability of the transfer learning approach to deal with low-resource languages that widely differ from high-resource languages as well as other Latin-based, low-resource languages.

How closely does the translation match the meaning of the reference has always been a key aspect of any machine translation (MT) service. Therefore, the primary goal of this research is to assess and compare translation adequacy in machine vs human translation (HT) from Arabic to English. The study looks into whether the MT product is adequate and more reliable than the HT. It also seeks to determine whether MT poses a real threat to professional Arabic–English translators.

Six different texts were chosen and translated from Arabic to English by two nonexpert undergraduate translation students as well as MT services, including Google Translate and Babylon Translation. The first system is free, whereas the second system is a fee-based service. Additionally, two expert translators developed a reference translation (RT) against which human and machine translations were compared and analyzed. Furthermore, the Sketch Engine software was utilized to examine the translations to determine if there is a significant difference between human and machine translations against the RT.

The findings indicated that when compared to the RT, there was no statistically significant difference between human and machine translations and that MTs were adequate translations. The human–machine relationship is mutually beneficial. However, MT will never be able to completely automated; rather, it will benefit rather than endanger humans. A translator who knows how to use MT will have an opportunity over those who are unfamiliar with the most up-to-date translation technology. As MTs improve, human translators may no longer be accurate translators, but rather editors and editing materials previously translated by machines.

The findings of this study provide valuable and practical implications for research in the field of MTs and for anyone interested in conducting MT research.

In general, this study is significant as it is a serious attempt at getting a better understanding of the efficiency of MT vs HT in translating the Arabic–English texts, and it will be beneficial for translators, students, educators as well as scholars in the field of translation.

Multi-label Text Classification (MTC) is one of the most recent research trends in data mining and information retrieval domains because of many reasons such as the rapid growth of online data and the increasing tendency of internet users to be more comfortable with assigning multiple labels/tags to describe documents, emails, posts, etc. The dimensionality of labels makes MTC more difficult and challenging compared with traditional single-labeled text classification (TC). Because it is a natural extension of TC, several ways are proposed to benefit from the rich literature of TC through what is called problem transformation (PT) methods. Basically, PT methods transform the multi-label data into a single-label one that is suitable for traditional single-label classification algorithms. Another approach is to design novel classification algorithms customized for MTC. Over the past decade, several works have appeared on both approaches focusing mainly on the English language. This work aims to present an elaborate study of MTC of Arabic articles.

This paper presents a novel lexicon-based method for MTC, where the keywords that are most associated with each label are extracted from the training data along with a threshold that can later be used to determine whether each test document belongs to a certain label.

The experiments show that the presented approach outperforms the currently available approaches. Specifically, the results of our experiments show that the best accuracy obtained from existing approaches is only 18 per cent, whereas the accuracy of the presented lexicon-based approach can reach an accuracy level of 31 per cent.

Although there exist some tools that can be customized to address the MTC problem for Arabic text, their accuracies are very low when applied to Arabic articles. This paper presents a novel method for MTC. The experiments show that the presented approach outperforms the currently available approaches.