Tamer Elsayed


2023

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IDRISI-RA: The First Arabic Location Mention Recognition Dataset of Disaster Tweets
Reem Suwaileh | Muhammad Imran | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Extracting geolocation information from social media data enables effective disaster management, as it helps response authorities; for example, in locating incidents for planning rescue activities, and affected people for evacuation. Nevertheless, geolocation extraction is greatly understudied for the low resource languages such as Arabic. To fill this gap, we introduce IDRISI-RA, the first publicly-available Arabic Location Mention Recognition (LMR) dataset that provides human- and automatically-labeled versions in order of thousands and millions of tweets, respectively. It contains both location mentions and their types (e.g., district, city). Our extensive analysis shows the decent geographical, domain, location granularity, temporal, and dialectical coverage of IDRISI-RA. Furthermore, we establish baselines using the standard Arabic NER models and build two simple, yet effective, LMR models. Our rigorous experiments confirm the need for developing specific models for Arabic LMR in the disaster domain. Moreover, experiments show the promising domain and geographical generalizability of IDRISI-RA under zero-shot learning.

2022

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Proceedinsg of the 5th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools with Shared Tasks on Qur'an QA and Fine-Grained Hate Speech Detection
Hend Al-Khalifa | Tamer Elsayed | Hamdy Mubarak | Abdulmohsen Al-Thubaity | Walid Magdy | Kareem Darwish
Proceedinsg of the 5th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools with Shared Tasks on Qur'an QA and Fine-Grained Hate Speech Detection

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Detecting Users Prone to Spread Fake News on Arabic Twitter
Zien Sheikh Ali | Abdulaziz Al-Ali | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedinsg of the 5th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools with Shared Tasks on Qur'an QA and Fine-Grained Hate Speech Detection

The spread of misinformation has become a major concern to our society, and social media is one of its main culprits. Evidently, health misinformation related to vaccinations has slowed down global efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have shown that fake news spreads substantially faster than real news on social media networks. One way to limit this fast dissemination is by assessing information sources in a semi-automatic way. To this end, we aim to identify users who are prone to spread fake news in Arabic Twitter. Such users play an important role in spreading misinformation and identifying them has the potential to control the spread. We construct an Arabic dataset on Twitter users, which consists of 1,546 users, of which 541 are prone to spread fake news (based on our definition). We use features extracted from users’ recent tweets, e.g., linguistic, statistical, and profile features, to predict whether they are prone to spread fake news or not. To tackle the classification task, multiple learning models are employed and evaluated. Empirical results reveal promising detection performance, where an F1 score of 0.73 was achieved by the logistic regression model. Moreover, when tested on a benchmark English dataset, our approach has outperformed the current state-of-the-art for this task.

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Qur’an QA 2022: Overview of The First Shared Task on Question Answering over the Holy Qur’an
Rana Malhas | Watheq Mansour | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedinsg of the 5th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools with Shared Tasks on Qur'an QA and Fine-Grained Hate Speech Detection

Motivated by the resurgence of the machine reading comprehension (MRC) research, we have organized the first Qur’an Question Answering shared task, “Qur’an QA 2022”. The task in its first year aims to promote state-of-the-art research on Arabic QA in general and MRC in particular on the Holy Qur’an, which constitutes a rich and fertile source of knowledge for Muslim and non-Muslim inquisitors and knowledge-seekers. In this paper, we provide an overview of the shared task that succeeded in attracting 13 teams to participate in the final phase, with a total of 30 submitted runs. Moreover, we outline the main approaches adopted by the participating teams in the context of highlighting some of our perceptions and general trends that characterize the participating systems and their submitted runs.

2021

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ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection
Fatima Haouari | Maram Hasanain | Reem Suwaileh | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

In this paper we introduce ArCOV19-Rumors, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset for misinformation detection composed of tweets containing claims from 27th January till the end of April 2020. We collected 138 verified claims, mostly from popular fact-checking websites, and identified 9.4K relevant tweets to those claims. Tweets were manually-annotated by veracity to support research on misinformation detection, which is one of the major problems faced during a pandemic. ArCOV19-Rumors supports two levels of misinformation detection over Twitter: verifying free-text claims (called claim-level verification) and verifying claims expressed in tweets (called tweet-level verification). Our dataset covers, in addition to health, claims related to other topical categories that were influenced by COVID-19, namely, social, politics, sports, entertainment, and religious. Moreover, we present benchmarking results for tweet-level verification on the dataset. We experimented with SOTA models of versatile approaches that either exploit content, user profiles features, temporal features and propagation structure of the conversational threads for tweet verification.

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ArCOV-19: The First Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset with Propagation Networks
Fatima Haouari | Maram Hasanain | Reem Suwaileh | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

In this paper, we present ArCOV-19, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset that spans one year, covering the period from 27th of January 2020 till 31st of January 2021. ArCOV-19 is the first publicly-available Arabic Twitter dataset covering COVID-19 pandemic that includes about 2.7M tweets alongside the propagation networks of the most-popular subset of them (i.e., most-retweeted and -liked). The propagation networks include both retweetsand conversational threads (i.e., threads of replies). ArCOV-19 is designed to enable research under several domains including natural language processing, information retrieval, and social computing. Preliminary analysis shows that ArCOV-19 captures rising discussions associated with the first reported cases of the disease as they appeared in the Arab world.In addition to the source tweets and the propagation networks, we also release the search queries and the language-independent crawler used to collect the tweets to encourage the curation of similar datasets.

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AraFacts: The First Large Arabic Dataset of Naturally Occurring Claims
Zien Sheikh Ali | Watheq Mansour | Tamer Elsayed | Abdulaziz Al‐Ali
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

We introduce AraFacts, the first large Arabic dataset of naturally occurring claims collected from 5 Arabic fact-checking websites, e.g., Fatabyyano and Misbar, and covering claims since 2016. Our dataset consists of 6,121 claims along with their factual labels and additional metadata, such as fact-checking article content, topical category, and links to posts or Web pages spreading the claim. Since the data is obtained from various fact-checking websites, we standardize the original claim labels to provide a unified label rating for all claims. Moreover, we provide revealing dataset statistics and motivate its use by suggesting possible research applications. The dataset is made publicly available for the research community.

2020

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Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, with a Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection
Hend Al-Khalifa | Walid Magdy | Kareem Darwish | Tamer Elsayed | Hamdy Mubarak
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, with a Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection

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Overview of OSACT4 Arabic Offensive Language Detection Shared Task
Hamdy Mubarak | Kareem Darwish | Walid Magdy | Tamer Elsayed | Hend Al-Khalifa
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, with a Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection

This paper provides an overview of the offensive language detection shared task at the 4th workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT4). There were two subtasks, namely: Subtask A, involving the detection of offensive language, which contains unacceptable or vulgar content in addition to any kind of explicit or implicit insults or attacks against individuals or groups; and Subtask B, involving the detection of hate speech, which contains insults or threats targeting a group based on their nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, political or sport affiliation, religious belief, or other common characteristics. In total, 40 teams signed up to participate in Subtask A, and 14 of them submitted test runs. For Subtask B, 33 teams signed up to participate and 13 of them submitted runs. We present and analyze all submissions in this paper.

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Quick and Simple Approach for Detecting Hate Speech in Arabic Tweets
Abeer Abuzayed | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, with a Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection

As the use of social media platforms increases extensively to freely communicate and share opinions, hate speech becomes an outstanding problem that requires urgent attention. This paper focuses on the problem of detecting hate speech in Arabic tweets. To tackle the problem efficiently, we adopt a “quick and simple” approach by which we investigate the effectiveness of 15 classical (e.g., SVM) and neural (e.g., CNN) learning models, while exploring two different term representations. Our experiments on 8k labelled dataset show that the best neural learning models outperform the classical ones, while distributed term representation is more effective than statistical bag-of-words representation. Overall, our best classifier (that combines both CNN and RNN in a joint architecture) achieved 0.73 macro-F1 score on the dev set, which significantly outperforms the majority-class baseline that achieves 0.49, proving the effectiveness of our “quick and simple” approach.

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Are We Ready for this Disaster? Towards Location Mention Recognition from Crisis Tweets
Reem Suwaileh | Muhammad Imran | Tamer Elsayed | Hassan Sajjad
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The widespread usage of Twitter during emergencies has provided a new opportunity and timely resource to crisis responders for various disaster management tasks. Geolocation information of pertinent tweets is crucial for gaining situational awareness and delivering aid. However, the majority of tweets do not come with geoinformation. In this work, we focus on the task of location mention recognition from crisis-related tweets. Specifically, we investigate the influence of different types of labeled training data on the performance of a BERT-based classification model. We explore several training settings such as combing in- and out-domain data from news articles and general-purpose and crisis-related tweets. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of geospatial proximity while training on near or far-away events from the target event. Using five different datasets, our extensive experiments provide answers to several critical research questions that are useful for the research community to foster research in this important direction. For example, results show that, for training a location mention recognition model, Twitter-based data is preferred over general-purpose data; and crisis-related data is preferred over general-purpose Twitter data. Furthermore, training on data from geographically-nearby disaster events to the target event boosts the performance compared to training on distant events.

2019

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Simple But Not Naïve: Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Identification Using Only N-Grams
Sohaila Eltanbouly | May Bashendy | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

This paper presents the participation of Qatar University team in MADAR shared task, which addresses the problem of sentence-level fine-grained Arabic Dialect Identification over 25 different Arabic dialects in addition to the Modern Standard Arabic. Arabic Dialect Identification is not a trivial task since different dialects share some features, e.g., utilizing the same character set and some vocabularies. We opted to adopt a very simple approach in terms of extracted features and classification models; we only utilize word and character n-grams as features, and Na ̈ıve Bayes models as classifiers. Surprisingly, the simple approach achieved non-na ̈ıve performance. The official results, reported on a held-out testing set, show that the dialect of a given sentence can be identified at an accuracy of 64.58% by our best submitted run.

2018

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DART: A Large Dataset of Dialectal Arabic Tweets
Israa Alsarsour | Esraa Mohamed | Reem Suwaileh | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

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QU-BIGIR at SemEval 2017 Task 3: Using Similarity Features for Arabic Community Question Answering Forums
Marwan Torki | Maram Hasanain | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017)

In this paper we describe our QU-BIGIR system for the Arabic subtask D of the SemEval 2017 Task 3. Our approach builds on our participation in the past version of the same subtask. This year, our system uses different similarity measures that encodes lexical and semantic pairwise similarity of text pairs. In addition to well known similarity measures such as cosine similarity, we use other measures based on the summary statistics of word embedding representation for a given text. To rank a list of candidate question answer pairs for a given question, we learn a linear SVM classifier over our similarity features. Our best resulting run came second in subtask D with a very competitive performance to the first-ranking system.

2016

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QU-IR at SemEval 2016 Task 3: Learning to Rank on Arabic Community Question Answering Forums with Word Embedding
Rana Malhas | Marwan Torki | Tamer Elsayed
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

2009

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Arabic Cross-Document Coreference Resolution
Asad Sayeed | Tamer Elsayed | Nikesh Garera | David Alexander | Tan Xu | Doug Oard | David Yarowsky | Christine Piatko
Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers

2008

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Resolving Personal Names in Email Using Context Expansion
Tamer Elsayed | Douglas W. Oard | Galileo Namata
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT

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Pairwise Document Similarity in Large Collections with MapReduce
Tamer Elsayed | Jimmy Lin | Douglas Oard
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, Short Papers