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Sentiment analysis is an essential process which is important to many natural language applications. In this paper, we apply two models for Arabic sentiment analysis to the ASTD and ATDFS datasets, in both 2-class and multiclass forms. Model MC1 is a 2-layer CNN with global average pooling, followed by a dense layer. MC2 is a 2-layer CNN with max pooling, followed by a BiGRU and a dense layer. On the difficult ASTD 4-class task, we achieve 73.17%, compared to 65.58% reported by Attia et al., 2018. For the easier 2-class task, we achieve 90.06% with MC1 compared to 85.58% reported by Kwaik et al., 2019. We carry out experiments on various data splits, to match those used by other researchers. We also pay close attention to Arabic preprocessing and include novel steps not reported in other works. In an ablation study, we investigate the effect of two steps in particular, the processing of emoticons and the use of a custom stoplist. On the 4-class task, these can make a difference of up to 4.27% and 5.48%, respectively. On the 2-class task, the maximum improvements are 2.95% and 3.87%.

In this paper we present the Amharic Speech Emotion Dataset (ASED), which covers four dialects (Gojjam, Wollo, Shewa and Gonder) and five different emotions (neutral, fearful, happy, sad and angry). We believe it is the first Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) dataset for the Amharic language. 65 volunteer participants, all native speakers, recorded 2,474 sound samples, two to four seconds in length. Eight judges assigned emotions to the samples with high agreement level (Fleiss kappa = 0.8). The resulting dataset is freely available for download. Next, we developed a four-layer variant of the well-known VGG model which we call VGGb. Three experiments were then carried out using VGGb for SER, using ASED. First, we investigated whether Mel-spectrogram features or Mel-frequency Cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features work best for Amharic. This was done by training two VGGb SER models on ASED, one using Mel-spectrograms and the other using MFCC. Four forms of training were tried, standard cross-validation, and three variants based on sentences, dialects and speaker groups. Thus, a sentence used for training would not be used for testing, and the same for a dialect and speaker group. The conclusion was that MFCC features are superior under all four training schemes. MFCC was therefore adopted for Experiment 2, where VGGb and three other existing models were compared on ASED: RESNet50, Alex-Net and LSTM. VGGb was found to have very good accuracy (90.73%) as well as the fastest training time. In Experiment 3, the performance of VGGb was compared when trained on two existing SER datasets, RAVDESS (English) and EMO-DB (German) as well as on ASED (Amharic). Results are comparable across these languages, with ASED being the highest. This suggests that VGGb can be successfully applied to other languages. We hope that ASED will encourage researchers to experiment with other models for Amharic SER., Comment: 16 pages, 12 tables, 6 figures

In computer vision, image classification is one of the potential image processing tasks. Nowadays, fish classification is a wide considered issue within the areas of machine learning and image segmentation. Moreover, it has been extended to a variety of domains, such as marketing strategies. This paper presents an effective fish classification method based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The experiments were conducted on the new dataset of Bangladesh’s indigenous fish species with three kinds of splitting: 80-20%, 75-25%, and 70-30%. We provide a comprehensive comparison of several popular optimizers of CNN. In total, we perform a comparative analysis of 5 different state-of-the-art gradient descent-based optimizers, namely adaptive delta (AdaDelta), stochastic gradient descent (SGD), adaptive momentum (Adam), adaptive max pooling (Adamax), Root mean square propagation (Rmsprop), for CNN. Overall, the obtained experimental results show that Rmsprop, Adam, Adamax performed well compared to the other optimization techniques used, while AdaDelta and SGD performed the worst. Furthermore, the experimental results demonstrated that Adam optimizer attained the best results in performance measures for 70-30% and 80-20% splitting experiments, while the Rmsprop optimizer attained the best results in terms of performance measures of 70-25% splitting experiments. Finally, the proposed model is then compared with state-of-the-art deep CNNs models. Therefore, the proposed model attained the best accuracy of 98.46% in enhancing the CNN ability in classification, among others.

Although the Arabic language is the fourth most popular language in the world, it has not received sufficient attention in artificial intelligence research, especially in automatic speech recognition (ASR). The key feature of the Arabic language is that its words are pronounced exactly as they are written. Above all, taking into account the diacritics, 2 there are no words with similar pronunciation and writing. This motivates us to think of building an Arabic ASR system by recognizing its alphabet phonetics. Therefore, the Arabic alphabet phonemes classification must be studied, this is what the paper aims to achieve. In this paper, we create a new dataset, called Arabic alphabet phonetics dataset (AAPD). AAPD was collected by taking sound recordings of 1420 persons. We build several Arabic alphabet phonemes classification systems using three feature extraction techniques and four deep neural networks. Based on AAPD, we designed numerous experiments to compare the performance of feature extraction and classification methods, which can be used as a benchmark. Experimental results showed that Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) is considered most effective to feature extraction due to its highest accuracy, particularly when using 20 for Mel-bands number the training time is the least. Additionally, the appropriate model that achieved the highest accuracy with the least computational load is the proposed model VGG–based, where acquired an accuracy of 95.68%.