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Hate speech constitutes a major problem on microblogging platforms, with automatic detection being a growing research area. Most existing works focus on analyzing the content of social media posts. Our study shifts focus to predicting which users are likely to become targets of hate speech. This paper proposes a novel Hate-speech Target Prediction Framework (HTPK) and introduces a new Hate Speech Target Dataset (HSTD), which contains tweets labeled for targets and non-targets of hate speech. Using a combination of Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF), N-grams, and Part-of-Speech (PoS) tags, we tested various machine learning algorithms, Naïve Bayes (NB) classifier performs best with an accuracy of 93%, significantly outperforming other algorithms. This research identifies the optimal combination of features for predicting hate speech targets and compares various machine learning algorithms, providing a foundation for more proactive hate speech mitigation on social media platforms.

Background: The trend in producing linked open data to publish high-quality interlinked data has gained widespread traction in recent years. Various sectors are producing linked open data to increase public access and ensure transparency, in addition to a better utilization of government data, namely linked open government data. Problem Definition: As compared to the developed countries, Saudi Arabia lags behind in benefiting from this new era of ubiquitous web of data, despite its publication of government related data in non-linked format. In the context of Saudi open government data, the full potential of multi-category data published by various government agencies at different portals is not being realized as the data are not published in open data format and remain unlinked to other existing datasets. Methodology: To bridge this gap, this study presents a framework to extract and generate semantically enriched data from various data sources under different domains. The framework was used to produce the Saudi linked open government data cloud by interlinking data entities with each other and with external existing open datasets. Results: The effectiveness of our approach is validated by applying it to a socially significant issue, i.e., divorce rate, in Saudi Arabia. By posing smart queries to semantically enriched data, we were able to perform an in-depth analysis of different factors related to increasing divorce rates in Saudi Arabia. Arguably, without using linked open data and related technologies such analysis would not have been possible. Finally, we also present a simulated visual environment for better understanding and communication of such analysis for decision and policy makers.

Twitter has become a common place to share opinions about various issues. One such issue was the driving of women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Many researchers have addressed this issue using methods mostly from social sciences, however, these studies are on a smaller scale. In this paper, we take the approach of understanding the public discussions related to the topic #SaudiWomenCanDrive using methods from network science. Network science allows us to understand the influential people, topics, and communities related to the topic on a large scale. Around two million tweets posted by 630 thousand users are analyzed. Retweet, mention, co-mention, and hash-tag networks are extracted from these tweets. Analysis shows that most influential users include women rights activists like Loujain Hathloul and Manal Alsharif, as well as the political leadership like King Salman bin Abdulaziz and government departments like Ministry of Interior (MoI) and Traffic Department (Moroor). Most important topics identified through hashtags include the support for the movement like (The King Supports Women’s Driving) as well as against it like (Saudis Refuse Women’s Driving). Analyzing such discussions is important for gaining insights into public discussions for understanding public concerns and can be used by the government and non-government organizations to address them.

Software engineering artifact extraction from natural language requirements without human intervention is a challenging task. Out of these artifacts, the use case plays a prominent role in software design and development. In the literature, most of the approaches are either semi-automated or necessitate formalism or make use of restricted natural language for the extraction of use cases from textual requirements. In this paper, we resolve the challenge of automated artifact extraction from natural language requirements. We propose an automated approach to generate use cases, actors, and their relationships from natural language requirements. Our proposed approach involves no human intervention or formalism. To automate the proposed approach, we have used Natural Language Processing and Network Science. Our proposed approach provides promising results for the extraction of use case elements from natural language requirements. We validate the proposed approach using several literature-based case studies. The proposed approach significantly improves the results in comparison to an existing approach. On average, the proposed approach achieves around 71.5% accuracy (F-Measure), whereas the baseline method achieves around 16% accuracy (F-Measure) on average. The evaluation of the proposed approach on the literature-based case studies shows its significance for the extraction of use case elements from natural language requirements. The approach reduces human effort in software design and development.

With the ever-growing demand of electric power, it is quite challenging to detect and prevent Non-Technical Loss (NTL) in power industries. NTL is committed by meter bypassing, hooking from the main lines, reversing and tampering the meters. Manual on-site checking and reporting of NTL remains an unattractive strategy due to the required manpower and associated cost. The use of machine learning classifiers has been an attractive option for NTL detection. It enhances data-oriented analysis and high hit ratio along with less cost and manpower requirements. However, there is still a need to explore the results across multiple types of classifiers on a real-world dataset. This paper considers a real dataset from a power supply company in Pakistan to identify NTL. We have evaluated 15 existing machine learning classifiers across 9 types which also include the recently developed CatBoost, LGBoost and XGBoost classifiers. Our work is validated using extensive simulations. Results elucidate that ensemble methods and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) outperform the other types of classifiers for NTL detection in our real dataset. Moreover, we have also derived a procedure to identify the top-14 features out of a total of 71 features, which are contributing 77% in predicting NTL. We conclude that including more features beyond this threshold does not improve performance and thus limiting to the selected feature set reduces the computation time required by the classifiers. Last but not least, the paper also analyzes the results of the classifiers with respect to their types, which has opened a new area of research in NTL detection.

Social Media (SM) platforms, particularly Twitter, have become useful tools for startup companies (henceforth startups) which use the latter to support most of their business activities. As a result, there is a need to gauge the performance of specific business initiatives vis-à-vis public sentiment, or more specifically the spread of such initiatives based on Twitter user-generated content. Previous research which makes use of Twitter analysis to analyze the business activities of startups is minimal, especially for Twitter user content in the Arabic language. Consequently, this paper proposes an analytics-based framework called Startup Initiatives Response Analysis (SIRA) designed to assess the performance of initiatives launched by startups via text classification, sentiment analysis, and statistical analysis techniques. To provide empirical evidence for the viability of the proposed research framework, this paper examined the case of an Arab transportation network startup, carrying out a SIRA analysis of an initiative undertaken by Careem to empower women by encouraging them to work for the company. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework for statistically measuring the initiative spread and the public feedback based on the user-generated content on the Twitter social platform.

Sentiment classification is an active area of research with applications in many domains. Many researchers in the past have proposed techniques to identify sentiments with reasonable accuracy. However, the focus is more on the syntactic and semantic features of the documents. These features are effective but they ignore the user's past sentiments. In this research, we hypothesize that the past sentiments help the classifier to effectively link the user's history along with the contents of the current tweet. Thus, allowing learning algorithms to correlate past activities in determining the current sentiments. For this sake, we propose three sliding window features to accumulate past sentiments from the time series data. In this paper, we propose seven variations of Context-aware Sliding Window (CSW) features on different machine learning and deep learning algorithms. Furthermore, we propose a temporal dataset of user tweets, which is manually labeled by nine human annotators. The proposed dataset consists of 36 users having 4,557 tweets. Results indicate significant improvements over six state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Deep learning (DL) has attracted increasing attention on account of its significant processing power in tasks, such as speech, image, or text processing. In order to the exponential development and widespread availability of digital social media (SM), analyzing these data using traditional tools and technologies is tough or even intractable. DL is found as an appropriate solution to this problem. In this paper, we keenly discuss the practiced DL architectures by presenting a taxonomy-oriented summary, following the major efforts made toward the SM analytics (SMA). Nevertheless, instead of the technical description, this paper emphasis on describing the SMA-oriented problems with the DL-based solutions. To this end, we also highlight the DL research challenges (such as scalability, heterogeneity, and multimodality) and future trends.