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Recent advancements in high-fidelity dynamic scene reconstruction have leveraged dynamic 3D Gaussians and 4D Gaussian Splatting for realistic scene representation. However, to make these methods viable for real-time applications such as AR/VR, gaming, and rendering on low-power devices, substantial reductions in memory usage and improvements in rendering efficiency are required. While many state-of-the-art methods prioritize lightweight implementations, they struggle in handling scenes with complex motions or long sequences. In this work, we introduce Temporally Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting (TC3DGS), a novel technique designed specifically to effectively compress dynamic 3D Gaussian representations. TC3DGS selectively prunes Gaussians based on their temporal relevance and employs gradient-aware mixed-precision quantization to dynamically compress Gaussian parameters. It additionally relies on a variation of the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm in a post-processing step to further reduce storage by interpolating Gaussian trajectories across frames. Our experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that TC3DGS achieves up to 67$\times$ compression with minimal or no degradation in visual quality., Comment: Code will be released soon

We introduce SinaTools, an open-source Python package for Arabic natural language processing and understanding. SinaTools is a unified package allowing people to integrate it into their system workflow, offering solutions for various tasks such as flat and nested Named Entity Recognition (NER), fully-flagged Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), Semantic Relatedness, Synonymy Extractions and Evaluation, Lemmatization, Part-of-speech Tagging, Root Tagging, and additional helper utilities such as corpus processing, text stripping methods, and diacritic-aware word matching. This paper presents SinaTools and its benchmarking results, demonstrating that SinaTools outperforms all similar tools on the aforementioned tasks, such as Flat NER (87.33%), Nested NER (89.42%), WSD (82.63%), Semantic Relatedness (0.49 Spearman rank), Lemmatization (90.5%), POS tagging (97.5%), among others. SinaTools can be downloaded from (https://sina.birzeit.edu/sinatools)., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures

In spite of the recent progress in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. This situation only furthers an already wide technological divide, thereby hindering technological and socioeconomic inclusion. This challenge is largely due to the absence of datasets that can empower diverse speech systems. In this paper, we seek to mitigate this obstacle for a number of Arabic dialects by presenting Casablanca, a large-scale community-driven effort to collect and transcribe a multi-dialectal Arabic dataset. The dataset covers eight dialects: Algerian, Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni, and includes annotations for transcription, gender, dialect, and code-switching. We also develop a number of strong baselines exploiting Casablanca. The project page for Casablanca is accessible at: www.dlnlp.ai/speech/casablanca.

Event-argument extraction is a challenging task, particularly in Arabic due to sparse linguistic resources. To fill this gap, we introduce the \hadath corpus ($550$k tokens) as an extension of Wojood, enriched with event-argument annotations. We used three types of event arguments: $agent$, $location$, and $date$, which we annotated as relation types. Our inter-annotator agreement evaluation resulted in $82.23\%$ $Kappa$ score and $87.2\%$ $F_1$-score. Additionally, we propose a novel method for event relation extraction using BERT, in which we treat the task as text entailment. This method achieves an $F_1$-score of $94.01\%$. To further evaluate the generalization of our proposed method, we collected and annotated another out-of-domain corpus (about $80$k tokens) called \testNLI and used it as a second test set, on which our approach achieved promising results ($83.59\%$ $F_1$-score). Last but not least, we propose an end-to-end system for event-arguments extraction. This system is implemented as part of SinaTools, and both corpora are publicly available at {\small \url{https://sina.birzeit.edu/wojood}}

This paper presents an overview of the Arabic Natural Language Understanding (ArabicNLU 2024) shared task, focusing on two subtasks: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and Location Mention Disambiguation (LMD). The task aimed to evaluate the ability of automated systems to resolve word ambiguity and identify locations mentioned in Arabic text. We provided participants with novel datasets, including a sense-annotated corpus for WSD, called SALMA with approximately 34k annotated tokens, and the IDRISI-DA dataset with 3,893 annotations and 763 unique location mentions. These are challenging tasks. Out of the 38 registered teams, only three teams participated in the final evaluation phase, with the highest accuracy being 77.8% for WSD and the highest MRR@1 being 95.0% for LMD. The shared task not only facilitated the evaluation and comparison of different techniques, but also provided valuable insights and resources for the continued advancement of Arabic NLU technologies., Comment: In Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2024), Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics

We present an overview of the FIGNEWS shared task, organized as part of the ArabicNLP 2024 conference co-located with ACL 2024. The shared task addresses bias and propaganda annotation in multilingual news posts. We focus on the early days of the Israel War on Gaza as a case study. The task aims to foster collaboration in developing annotation guidelines for subjective tasks by creating frameworks for analyzing diverse narratives highlighting potential bias and propaganda. In a spirit of fostering and encouraging diversity, we address the problem from a multilingual perspective, namely within five languages: English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi. A total of 17 teams participated in two annotation subtasks: bias (16 teams) and propaganda (6 teams). The teams competed in four evaluation tracks: guidelines development, annotation quality, annotation quantity, and consistency. Collectively, the teams produced 129,800 data points. Key findings and implications for the field are discussed., Comment: 18 pages, 10 tables, 1 figure, accepted to ArabicNLP 2024 co-located with ACL 2024

We present WojoodNER-2024, the second Arabic Named Entity Recognition (NER) Shared Task. In WojoodNER-2024, we focus on fine-grained Arabic NER. We provided participants with a new Arabic fine-grained NER dataset called wojoodfine, annotated with subtypes of entities. WojoodNER-2024 encompassed three subtasks: (i) Closed-Track Flat Fine-Grained NER, (ii) Closed-Track Nested Fine-Grained NER, and (iii) an Open-Track NER for the Israeli War on Gaza. A total of 43 unique teams registered for this shared task. Five teams participated in the Flat Fine-Grained Subtask, among which two teams tackled the Nested Fine-Grained Subtask and one team participated in the Open-Track NER Subtask. The winning teams achieved F-1 scores of 91% and 92% in the Flat Fine-Grained and Nested Fine-Grained Subtasks, respectively. The sole team in the Open-Track Subtask achieved an F-1 score of 73.7%.

The expanding financial markets of the Arab world require sophisticated Arabic NLP tools. To address this need within the banking domain, the Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP) shared task proposes two subtasks: (i) Multi-dialect Intent Detection and (ii) Cross-dialect Translation and Intent Preservation. This shared task uses the updated ArBanking77 dataset, which includes about 39k parallel queries in MSA and four dialects. Each query is labeled with one or more of a common 77 intents in the banking domain. These resources aim to foster the development of robust financial Arabic NLP, particularly in the areas of machine translation and banking chat-bots. A total of 45 unique teams registered for this shared task, with 11 of them actively participated in the test phase. Specifically, 11 teams participated in Subtask 1, while only 1 team participated in Subtask 2. The winning team of Subtask 1 achieved F1 score of 0.8773, and the only team submitted in Subtask 2 achieved a 1.667 BLEU score.

The proliferation of bias and propaganda on social media is an increasingly significant concern, leading to the development of techniques for automatic detection. This article presents a multilingual corpus of 12, 000 Facebook posts fully annotated for bias and propaganda. The corpus was created as part of the FigNews 2024 Shared Task on News Media Narratives for framing the Israeli War on Gaza. It covers various events during the War from October 7, 2023 to January 31, 2024. The corpus comprises 12, 000 posts in five languages (Arabic, Hebrew, English, French, and Hindi), with 2, 400 posts for each language. The annotation process involved 10 graduate students specializing in Law. The Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA) was used to evaluate the annotations of the corpus, with an average IAA of 80.8% for bias and 70.15% for propaganda annotations. Our team was ranked among the bestperforming teams in both Bias and Propaganda subtasks. The corpus is open-source and available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/fada

A Language Model is a term that encompasses various types of models designed to understand and generate human communication. Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention due to their ability to process text with human-like fluency and coherence, making them valuable for a wide range of data-related tasks fashioned as pipelines. The capabilities of LLMs in natural language understanding and generation, combined with their scalability, versatility, and state-of-the-art performance, enable innovative applications across various AI-related fields, including eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), and Knowledge Graphs (KG). Furthermore, we believe these models can extract valuable insights and make data-driven decisions at scale, a practice commonly referred to as Big Data Analytics (BDA). In this position paper, we provide some discussions in the direction of unlocking synergies among these technologies, which can lead to more powerful and intelligent AI solutions, driving improvements in data pipelines across a wide range of applications and domains integrating humans, computers, and knowledge.

We present Qabas, a novel open-source Arabic lexicon designed for NLP applications. The novelty of Qabas lies in its synthesis of 110 lexicons. Specifically, Qabas lexical entries (lemmas) are assembled by linking lemmas from 110 lexicons. Furthermore, Qabas lemmas are also linked to 12 morphologically annotated corpora (about 2M tokens), making it the first Arabic lexicon to be linked to lexicons and corpora. Qabas was developed semi-automatically, utilizing a mapping framework and a web-based tool. Compared with other lexicons, Qabas stands as the most extensive Arabic lexicon, encompassing about 58K lemmas (45K nominal lemmas, 12.5K verbal lemmas, and 473 functional-word lemmas). Qabas is open-source and accessible online at https://sina.birzeit.edu/qabas.

Semantic textual relatedness is a broader concept of semantic similarity. It measures the extent to which two chunks of text convey similar meaning or topics, or share related concepts or contexts. This notion of relatedness can be applied in various applications, such as document clustering and summarizing. SemRel-2024, a shared task in SemEval-2024, aims at reducing the gap in the semantic relatedness task by providing datasets for fourteen languages and dialects including Arabic. This paper reports on our participation in Track A (Algerian and Moroccan dialects) and Track B (Modern Standard Arabic). A BERT-based model is augmented and fine-tuned for regression scoring in supervised track (A), while BERT-based cosine similarity is employed for unsupervised track (B). Our system ranked 1st in SemRel-2024 for MSA with a Spearman correlation score of 0.49. We ranked 5th for Moroccan and 12th for Algerian with scores of 0.83 and 0.53, respectively.

This paper presents the ArBanking77, a large Arabic dataset for intent detection in the banking domain. Our dataset was arabized and localized from the original English Banking77 dataset, which consists of 13,083 queries to ArBanking77 dataset with 31,404 queries in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Palestinian dialect, with each query classified into one of the 77 classes (intents). Furthermore, we present a neural model, based on AraBERT, fine-tuned on ArBanking77, which achieved an F1-score of 0.9209 and 0.8995 on MSA and Palestinian dialect, respectively. We performed extensive experimentation in which we simulated low-resource settings, where the model is trained on a subset of the data and augmented with noisy queries to simulate colloquial terms, mistakes and misspellings found in real NLP systems, especially live chat queries. The data and the models are publicly available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/arbanking77.

SALMA, the first Arabic sense-annotated corpus, consists of ~34K tokens, which are all sense-annotated. The corpus is annotated using two different sense inventories simultaneously (Modern and Ghani). SALMA novelty lies in how tokens and senses are associated. Instead of linking a token to only one intended sense, SALMA links a token to multiple senses and provides a score to each sense. A smart web-based annotation tool was developed to support scoring multiple senses against a given word. In addition to sense annotations, we also annotated the corpus using six types of named entities. The quality of our annotations was assessed using various metrics (Kappa, Linear Weighted Kappa, Quadratic Weighted Kappa, Mean Average Error, and Root Mean Square Error), which show very high inter-annotator agreement. To establish a Word Sense Disambiguation baseline using our SALMA corpus, we developed an end-to-end Word Sense Disambiguation system using Target Sense Verification. We used this system to evaluate three Target Sense Verification models available in the literature. Our best model achieved an accuracy with 84.2% using Modern and 78.7% using Ghani. The full corpus and the annotation tool are open-source and publicly available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/salma/.

Traditional NER systems are typically trained to recognize coarse-grained entities, and less attention is given to classifying entities into a hierarchy of fine-grained lower-level subtypes. This article aims to advance Arabic NER with fine-grained entities. We chose to extend Wojood (an open-source Nested Arabic Named Entity Corpus) with subtypes. In particular, four main entity types in Wojood, geopolitical entity (GPE), location (LOC), organization (ORG), and facility (FAC), are extended with 31 subtypes. To do this, we first revised Wojood's annotations of GPE, LOC, ORG, and FAC to be compatible with the LDC's ACE guidelines, which yielded 5, 614 changes. Second, all mentions of GPE, LOC, ORG, and FAC (~44K) in Wojood are manually annotated with the LDC's ACE sub-types. We refer to this extended version of Wojood as WojoodF ine. To evaluate our annotations, we measured the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) using both Cohen's Kappa and F1 score, resulting in 0.9861 and 0.9889, respectively. To compute the baselines of WojoodF ine, we fine-tune three pre-trained Arabic BERT encoders in three settings: flat NER, nested NER and nested NER with subtypes and achieved F1 score of 0.920, 0.866, and 0.885, respectively. Our corpus and models are open-source and available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/wojood/.

This paper presents Nabra, a corpora of Syrian Arabic dialects with morphological annotations. A team of Syrian natives collected more than 6K sentences containing about 60K words from several sources including social media posts, scripts of movies and series, lyrics of songs and local proverbs to build Nabra. Nabra covers several local Syrian dialects including those of Aleppo, Damascus, Deir-ezzur, Hama, Homs, Huran, Latakia, Mardin, Raqqah, and Suwayda. A team of nine annotators annotated the 60K tokens with full morphological annotations across sentence contexts. We trained the annotators to follow methodological annotation guidelines to ensure unique morpheme annotations, and normalized the annotations. F1 and kappa agreement scores ranged between 74% and 98% across features, showing the excellent quality of Nabra annotations. Our corpora are open-source and publicly available as part of the Currasat portal https://sina.birzeit.edu/currasat.

We present WojoodNER-2023, the first Arabic Named Entity Recognition (NER) Shared Task. The primary focus of WojoodNER-2023 is on Arabic NER, offering novel NER datasets (i.e., Wojood) and the definition of subtasks designed to facilitate meaningful comparisons between different NER approaches. WojoodNER-2023 encompassed two Subtasks: FlatNER and NestedNER. A total of 45 unique teams registered for this shared task, with 11 of them actively participating in the test phase. Specifically, 11 teams participated in FlatNER, while $8$ teams tackled NestedNER. The winning teams achieved F1 scores of 91.96 and 93.73 in FlatNER and NestedNER, respectively.

Offensive language detection has been well studied in many languages, but it is lagging behind in low-resource languages, such as Hebrew. In this paper, we present a new offensive language corpus in Hebrew. A total of 15,881 tweets were retrieved from Twitter. Each was labeled with one or more of five classes (abusive, hate, violence, pornographic, or none offensive) by Arabic-Hebrew bilingual speakers. The annotation process was challenging as each annotator is expected to be familiar with the Israeli culture, politics, and practices to understand the context of each tweet. We fine-tuned two Hebrew BERT models, HeBERT and AlephBERT, using our proposed dataset and another published dataset. We observed that our data boosts HeBERT performance by 2% when combined with D_OLaH. Fine-tuning AlephBERT on our data and testing on D_OLaH yields 69% accuracy, while fine-tuning on D_OLaH and testing on our data yields 57% accuracy, which may be an indication to the generalizability our data offers. Our dataset and fine-tuned models are available on GitHub and Huggingface., Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, The 20th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA)

The adoption of cloud computing has brought significant advancements in the operational models of businesses. However, this shift also brings new security challenges by expanding the attack surface. The offered services in cloud computing have various service models. Each cloud service model has a defined responsibility divided based on the stack layers between the service user and their cloud provider. Regardless of its service model, each service is constructed from sub-components and services running on the underlying layers. In this paper, we aim to enable more transparency and visibility by designing an ontology that links the provider's services with the sub-components used to deliver the service. Such breakdown for each cloud service sub-components enables the end user to track the vulnerabilities on the service level or one of its sub-components. Such information can result in a better understanding and management of reported vulnerabilities on the sub-components level and their impact on the offered services by the cloud provider. Our ontology and source code are published as an open-source and accessible via GitHub: \href{https://github.com/mohkharma/cc-ontology}{mohkharma/cc-ontology}, Comment: 8 pages

As mobile and smart connectivity continue to grow, malware presents a permanently evolving threat to different types of critical domains such as health, logistics, banking, and community segments. Different types of malware have dynamic behaviors and complicated characteristics that are shared among members of the same malware family. Malware threat intelligence reports play a crucial role in describing and documenting the detected malware, providing a wealth of information regarding its attributes, patterns, and behaviors. There is a large amount of intelligent threat information regarding malware. The ontology allows the systematic organization and categorization of this information to ensure consistency in representing concepts and entities across various sources. In this study, we reviewed and extended an existing malware ontology to cover Android malware. Our extended ontology is called AndMalOnt. It consisted of 13 new classes, 16 object properties, and 31 data properties. Second, we created an Android malware knowledge graph by extracting reports from the MalwareBazaar repository and representing them in AndMalOnt. This involved generating a knowledge graph that encompasses over 2600 malware samples. Our ontology, knowledge graph, and source code are all open-source and accessible via GitHub

This paper addresses the task of extending a given synset with additional synonyms taking into account synonymy strength as a fuzzy value. Given a mono/multilingual synset and a threshold (a fuzzy value [0-1]), our goal is to extract new synonyms above this threshold from existing lexicons. We present twofold contributions: an algorithm and a benchmark dataset. The dataset consists of 3K candidate synonyms for 500 synsets. Each candidate synonym is annotated with a fuzzy value by four linguists. The dataset is important for (i) understanding how much linguists (dis/)agree on synonymy, in addition to (ii) using the dataset as a baseline to evaluate our algorithm. Our proposed algorithm extracts synonyms from existing lexicons and computes a fuzzy value for each candidate. Our evaluations show that the algorithm behaves like a linguist and its fuzzy values are close to those proposed by linguists (using RMSE and MAE). The dataset and a demo page are publicly available at https://portal.sina.birzeit.edu/synonyms.

Arabic language lacks semantic datasets and sense inventories. The most common semantically-labeled dataset for Arabic is the ArabGlossBERT, a relatively small dataset that consists of 167K context-gloss pairs (about 60K positive and 107K negative pairs), collected from Arabic dictionaries. This paper presents an enrichment to the ArabGlossBERT dataset, by augmenting it using (Arabic-English-Arabic) machine back-translation. Augmentation increased the dataset size to 352K pairs (149K positive and 203K negative pairs). We measure the impact of augmentation using different data configurations to fine-tune BERT on target sense verification (TSV) task. Overall, the accuracy ranges between 78% to 84% for different data configurations. Although our approach performed at par with the baseline, we did observe some improvements for some POS tags in some experiments. Furthermore, our fine-tuned models are trained on a larger dataset covering larger vocabulary and contexts. We provide an in-depth analysis of the accuracy for each part-of-speech (POS).