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The use of offensive terms in user-generated content on different social media platforms is one of the major concerns for these platforms. The offensive terms have a negative impact on individuals, which may lead towards the degradation of societal and civilized manners. The immense amount of content generated at a higher speed makes it humanly impossible to categorise and detect offensive terms. Besides, it is an open challenge for natural language processing (NLP) to detect such terminologies automatically. Substantial efforts are made for high-resource languages such as English. However, it becomes more challenging when dealing with resource-poor languages such as Urdu. Because of the lack of standard datasets and pre-processing tools for automatic offensive terms detection. This paper introduces a combinatorial preprocessing approach in developing a classification model for cross-platform (Twitter and YouTube) use. The approach uses datasets from two different platforms (Twitter and YouTube) the training and testing the model, which is trained to apply decision tree, random forest and naive Bayes algorithms. The proposed combinatorial pre-processing approach is applied to check how machine learning models behave with different combinations of standard pre-processing techniques for low-resource language in the cross-platform setting. The experimental results represent the effectiveness of the machine learning model over different subsets of traditional pre-processing approaches in building a classification model for automatic offensive terms detection for a low resource language, i.e., Urdu, in the cross-platform scenario. In the experiments, when dataset D1 is used for training and D2 is applied for testing, the pre-processing approach named Stopword removal produced better results with an accuracy of 83.27%. Whilst, in this case, when dataset D2 is used for training and D1 is applied for testing, stopword removal and punctuation removal were observed as a better preprocessing approach with an accuracy of 74.54%. The combinatorial approach proposed in this paper outperformed the benchmark for the considered datasets using classical as well as ensemble machine learning with an accuracy of 82.9% and 97.2% for dataset D1 and D2, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic degenerative joint disease affecting millions worldwide, particularly those over 60. It is a significant cause of disability and can impact an individual’s quality of life. The condition occurs when the cartilage in the knee joint wears away over time, leading to bone-onbone contact, which can result in pain, stiffness, swelling, and decreased range of motion. Deep neural networks, especially convolutional neural networks (CNN), are powerful tools in medical applications such as diagnosis and detection. This research proposes a CNN model to classify knee osteoarthritis into five categories using x-ray images. These classes are labeled: Minimal, Healthy, Moderate, Doubtful, and Severe. Furthermore, the proposed CNN model has been compared with two pre-trained transfer learning models: Xception and InceptionResNet V2. These models were evaluated based on precision, recall, F1 score, and accuracy. The results showed that although all three models performed very well, the proposed model outperformed both transfer learning models with 98% accuracy. It also achieved the highest values for other parameters such as precision, recall, and F1 score. The proposed model has several potential applications in clinical practice, such as assisting doctors in accurately classifying knee osteoarthritis severity levels by analyzing single X-ray images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has given voice to people around the globe. However, all voices are not counted due to the scarcity of lexical computational resources. Such resources could harness the torrent of social media text data. Computational resources for rich languages such as English are available. More are being developed, meanwhile strengthening and enhancing the current ones. However, Roman Sindhi, a resource-poor writing style, is a phonetically rich language lacking computational resources, creating a working space for researchers. This work attempts to develop lexical sentiment resources that will help calculate the public opinion expressed in Roman Sindhi and bring their point of view into the limelight. This work is one of the initial efforts to develop lexical Roman Sindhi sentiment dictionary resources to help detect sentiment orientation in a text. Furthermore, it also developed two interfaces to leverage the lexical resources--a Roman Sindhi to English translator (RoSET) that translates a Roman Sindhi feature into an equivalent English word and a Roman Sindhi rule-based sentiment scorer (RBRS3) that assigns sentiment score to a Roman Sindhi script features. The results obtained from the developed system accommodated the bilingual dataset (Roman Sindhi + English) more adequately. An increase of 20.8% was recorded for positive sentence detection, and a 16% increase was obtained for negative sentences, whereas neutral sentences were marginalized to a lower number (59.31% decrease). The resultant system makes those public voices expressed in the Roman Sindhi script get counted, which otherwise are in vain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning techniques, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have exhibited remarkable performance in solving vision-related problems, especially in unpredictable, dynamic, and challenging environments. In autonomous vehicles, imitation-learning-based steering angle prediction is viable due to the visual imagery comprehension of CNNs. In this regard, globally, researchers are currently focusing on the architectural design and optimization of the hyperparameters of CNNs to achieve the best results. Literature has proven the superiority of metaheuristic algorithms over the manual-tuning of CNNs. However, to the best of our knowledge, these techniques are yet to be applied to address the problem of imitation-learning-based steering angle prediction. Thus, in this study, we examine the application of the bat algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm for the optimization of the CNN model and its hyperparameters, which are employed to solve the steering angle prediction problem. To validate the performance of each hyperparameters' set and architectural parameters' set, we utilized the Udacity steering angle dataset and obtained the best results at the following hyperparameter set: optimizer, Adagrad; learning rate, 0.0052; and nonlinear activation function, exponential linear unit. As per our findings, we determined that the deep learning models show better results but require more training epochs and time as compared to shallower ones. Results show the superiority of our approach in optimizing CNNs through metaheuristic algorithms as compared with the manual-tuning approach. Infield testing was also performed using the model trained with the optimal architecture, which we developed using our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, multiple software development process models, tools, and techniques have been used by practitioners. Despite using these techniques, most software development organizations still fail to meet customer’s needs within time and budget. Time overrun is one of the major reasons for project failure. There is a need to come up with a comprehensive solution that would increase the chances of project success. However, the “make vs. buy” decision can be helpful for “in time” software development. Social media have become a popular platform for discussion of all sorts of topics, so software development is no exception. Software developers discuss all the pros and cons of making vs. buy decisions on Twitter and other social media platforms. Twitter trending is a typical feature that evaluates the level of popularity of a specific event on online networking. A mixed-method approach comprising of interviews of software industry experts and Twitter data extraction is applied to scrutinize the effective decision of software build vs. buy decision. The findings of the analysis show that software makes vs. buy decisions depend on several factors including cost, development technology, software development team skills, and time. Based on the finding of the study a framework is proposed for the decision to build versus buy in Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Furthermore, the framework has been designed to statistically indicate make versus buy decisions of the organization and to suggest appropriate choices based on different parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]