In the past years, toxic comments and offensive speech are polluting the internet and manual inspection of these comments is becoming a tiresome task to manage. Having a machine learning based model that is able to filter offensive Arabic content is of high need nowadays. In this paper, we describe the model that was submitted to the Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection that is organized by (The 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools). Our model makes use transformer based model (BERT) to detect offensive content. We came in the fourth place in subtask A (detecting Offensive Speech) and in the third place in subtask B (detecting Hate Speech).

Final submission for NileTMRG on RumourEval 2017.

This paper describes two systems that were used by the NileTMRG for addressing Arabic Sentiment Analysis as part of SemEval-2017, task 4. NileTMRG participated in three Arabic related subtasks which are: Subtask A (Message Polarity Classification), Subtask B (Topic-Based Message Polarity classification) and Subtask D (Tweet quantification). For subtask A, we made use of NU’s sentiment analyzer which we augmented with a scored lexicon. For subtasks B and D, we used an ensemble of three different classifiers. The first classifier was a convolutional neural network that used trained (word2vec) word embeddings. The second classifier consisted of a MultiLayer Perceptron while the third classifier was a Logistic regression model that takes the same input as the second classifier. Voting between the three classifiers was used to determine the final outcome. In all three Arabic related tasks in which NileTMRG participated, the team ranked at number one.

This paper presents NileULex, which is an Arabic sentiment lexicon containing close to six thousands Arabic words and compound phrases. Forty five percent of the terms and expressions in the lexicon are Egyptian or colloquial while fifty five percent are Modern Standard Arabic. While the collection of many of the terms included in the lexicon was done automatically, the actual addition of any term was done manually. One of the important criterions for adding terms to the lexicon, was that they be as unambiguous as possible. The result is a lexicon with a much higher quality than any translated variant or automatically constructed one. To demonstrate that a lexicon such as this can directly impact the task of sentiment analysis, a very basic machine learning based sentiment analyser that uses unigrams, bigrams, and lexicon based features was applied on two different Twitter datasets. The obtained results were compared to a baseline system that only uses unigrams and bigrams. The same lexicon based features were also generated using a publicly available translation of a popular sentiment lexicon. The experiments show that usage of the developed lexicon improves the results over both the baseline and the publicly available lexicon.