Maha Al-Yahya | King Saud University (original) (raw)

Papers by Maha Al-Yahya

Mathematics, 2022

Due to the promising performance of pre-trained language models for task-oriented dialogue system... more Due to the promising performance of pre-trained language models for task-oriented dialogue systems (DS) in English, some efforts to provide multilingual models for task-oriented DS in low-resource languages have emerged. These efforts still face a long-standing challenge due to the lack of high-quality data for these languages, especially Arabic. To circumvent the cost and time-intensive data collection and annotation, cross-lingual transfer learning can be used when few training data are available in the low-resource target language. Therefore, this study aims to explore the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning in building an end-to-end Arabic task-oriented DS using the mT5 transformer model. We use the Arabic task-oriented dialogue dataset (Arabic-TOD) in the training and testing of the model. We present the cross-lingual transfer learning deployed with three different approaches: mSeq2Seq, Cross-lingual Pre-training (CPT), and Mixed-Language Pre-training (MLT). We obt...

which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the origin... more which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. With recent advancements in Semantic Web technologies, a new trend in MCQ item generation has emerged through the use of ontologies. Ontologies are knowledge representation structures that formally describe entities in a domain and their relationships, thus enabling automated inference and reasoning. Ontology-based MCQ item generation is still in its infancy, but substantial research efforts are beingmade in the field. However, the applicability of these models for use in an educational setting has not been thoroughly evaluated. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of an ontology-based MCQ item generation system known as OntoQue. The evaluation was conducted using two different domain ontologies. The findings of this study show that ontology-basedMCQgeneration systems produce satisfactoryMCQ items to a certain extent. However, the evaluation als...

The Educational Review, USA, 2021

The IT job market demands graduates equipped with skills necessary for the new digital era. These... more The IT job market demands graduates equipped with skills necessary for the new digital era. These skills include complex problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity. To provide the students with the necessary experience and the opportunities to practice these skills to be ready for the job market, we present the design and evaluation of an introductory course in the IT Bachelor program at King Saud University. The course introduces students to the IT discipline and provides an opportunity to experience problem solving and engage in activities which foster creativity and innovation using design thinking methods. In this paper, we present the design of the course, its content and structure, and an evaluation of the course over the period of two semesters. Student and faculty surveys were used to collect the data, and quantitative and qualitative methods were used for data analysis and evaluation. The results of this study show that students enjoyed the course and were satisfied with the development of their knowledge and problem-solving skills using design thinking. Faculty also indicated that the course has helped students build solutions targeting real world problems, and enhanced their problem solving and creative thinking skills.

Complexity, 2021

Fake news detection (FND) involves predicting the likelihood that a particular news article (news... more Fake news detection (FND) involves predicting the likelihood that a particular news article (news report, editorial, expose, etc.) is intentionally deceptive. Arabic FND started to receive more attention in the last decade, and many detection approaches demonstrated some ability to detect fake news on multiple datasets. However, most existing approaches do not consider recent advances in natural language processing, i.e., the use of neural networks and transformers. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of neural network and transformer-based language models used for Arabic FND. We examine the use of neural networks and transformer-based language models for Arabic FND and show their performance compared to each other. We also conduct an extensive analysis of the possible reasons for the difference in performance results obtained by different approaches. The results demonstrate that transformer-based models outperform the neural network-based solutions, which led to a...

Computers, Materials & Continua, 2019

Text visualization is concerned with the representation of text in a graphical form to facilitate... more Text visualization is concerned with the representation of text in a graphical form to facilitate comprehension of large textual data. Its aim is to improve the ability to understand and utilize the wealth of text-based information available. An essential task in any scientific research is the study and review of previous works in the specified domain, a process that is referred to as the literature survey process. This process involves the identification of prior work and evaluating its relevance to the research question. With the enormous number of published studies available online in digital form, this becomes a cumbersome task for the researcher. This paper presents the design and implementation of a tool that aims to facilitate this process by identifying relevant work and suggesting clusters of articles by conceptual modeling, thus providing different options that enable the researcher to visualize a large number of articles in a graphical easy-to-analyze form. The tool helps the researcher in analyzing and synthesizing the literature and building a conceptual understanding of the designated research area. The evaluation of the tool shows that researchers have found it useful and that it supported the process of relevant work analysis given a specific research question, and 70% of the evaluators of the tool found it very useful.

The Electronic Library, 2018

PurposeIn the context of information retrieval, text genre is as important as its content, and kn... more PurposeIn the context of information retrieval, text genre is as important as its content, and knowledge of the text genre enhances the search engine features by providing customized retrieval. The purpose of this study is to explore and evaluate the use of stylometric analysis, a quantitative analysis for the linguistics features of text, to support the task of automated text genre detection for Classical Arabic text.Design/methodology/approachUnsupervised clustering and supervised classification were applied on the King Saud University Corpus of Classical Arabic texts (KSUCCA) using the most frequent words in the corpus (MFWs) as stylometric features. Four popular distance measures established in stylometric research are evaluated for the genre detection task.FindingsThe results of the experiments show that stylometry-based genre clustering and classification align well with human-defined genre. The evidence suggests that genre style signals exist for Classical Arabic and can be u...

Procedia Computer Science, 2016

This paper presents a project that explores the possibility of assessing the readability level of... more This paper presents a project that explores the possibility of assessing the readability level of Arabic medicine information leaflets using machine learning techniques. There are a number of popular readability formulas and tools that have been successfully used to assess the readability of health-related information in several languages. However, there is limited work on the readability assessment of health-related information, specifically medicine information leaflets in Arabic. We describe the design of a tool that uses machine learning to assess the readability of medicine information leaflets. We utilize a corpus comprising 1112 medicine information leaflets annotated with three difficulty levels. Based on a study of existing literature, we selected a number of features influencing text difficulty. The tool will help specialized organizations in medicine information leaflets production to produce the leaflets at appropriate level of reading for the majority of leaflets consumers.

International Journal of Modern Education and Computer Science, 2015

Semantic annotation is the process of adding semantic metadata to resources. Semantic metadata is... more Semantic annotation is the process of adding semantic metadata to resources. Semantic metadata is data concerning the meaning of entities and the relationships that exist. Semantic annotation cannot be performed without an ontology suitable for the task. In this research paper, we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a lexical ontology for Arabic semantic relations. The main purpose of the ontology is to facilitate the task of semantic annotation of the Arabic textual content. The ontology was evaluated for usability and usefulness using a prototype system for the automated semantic annotation of Arabic text. The results of the evaluation indicated that the ontology was fit for the purpose of semantic annotation of Arabic text with lexical relations. The evaluation has also revealed important findings and recommendations for designing Arabic semantic annotation tools.

Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 9th International Conference on Semantic Computing (IEEE ICSC 2015), 2015

Although the process of semantic annotation of Arabic Web content is essential for the realizatio... more Although the process of semantic annotation of Arabic Web content is essential for the realization of the Semantic Web, the process of semantic annotation cannot be performed without an ontology suitable for the task. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of the SemTree ontology for lexical semantic relations. The ontology was evaluated for usefulness using a prototype system for lexical semantic annotation of Arabic text. Results of the evaluation indicate that the ontology was fit for the purpose of semantic annotations with lexical relations. The evaluation also reveled important recommendations for designing Arabic semantic annotation tools.

Four years ago the College of Computer and Information Sciences at King Saud University started t... more Four years ago the College of Computer and Information Sciences at King Saud University started the development of a new Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Information Technology for female students. As the program is now in its second year of application, this paper presents the current program implementation, a comparison of its curriculum against national and international programs and

2011 IEEE 11th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, 2011

Assessment forms a key constituent of the instructional process. It provides a measure for evalua... more Assessment forms a key constituent of the instructional process. It provides a measure for evaluating learning and evaluating the effectiveness of instructional pedagogy. However, constructing assessment items for objective tests is a challenging task, which is time consuming and requires experience. This paper describes the OntoQue system, an engine for objective assessment item generation based on domain ontologies. Ontologies are

2009 22nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training, 2009

One of the essential learning outcomes for software engineering students is to be able to work ef... more One of the essential learning outcomes for software engineering students is to be able to work effectively in a team. A challenge facing academia is how to facilitate the development of these skills in students. One common approach is to involve students in collaborative activities such as group projects. However, working in a group does not necessarily imply that students

The Scientific World Journal, 2014

With recent advancements in Semantic Web technologies, a new trend in MCQ item generation has eme... more With recent advancements in Semantic Web technologies, a new trend in MCQ item generation has emerged through the use of ontologies. Ontologies are knowledge representation structures that formally describe entities in a domain and their relationships, thus enabling automated inference and reasoning. Ontology-based MCQ item generation is still in its infancy, but substantial research efforts are being made in the field. However, the applicability of these models for use in an educational setting has not been thoroughly evaluated. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of an ontology-based MCQ item generation system known as OntoQue. The evaluation was conducted using two different domain ontologies. The findings of this study show that ontology-based MCQ generation systems produce satisfactory MCQ items to a certain extent. However, the evaluation also revealed a number of shortcomings with current ontology-based MCQ item generation systems with regard to the education...

... Nadia S. Al-Ghreimil Information Technology Department College of Computer and Information Sc... more ... Nadia S. Al-Ghreimil Information Technology Department College of Computer and Information Sciences King Saud University Riyadh, Saudi Arabia alghreimil@ccis.edu.sa ... From GCC countries: The IT Department at Ahlia University in Bahrain requires 132 credit hours. ...

... Information Retrieval, Speech Recognition, Optical Character Recognition, Morphology Analysis... more ... Information Retrieval, Speech Recognition, Optical Character Recognition, Morphology Analysis,Semantic checking and Educational Applications. Little -if any-has been conducted toward leveraging semantic web technologies for serving the lexical semantics of the ... Kotb et al. ...

Seventh International Conference on Digital Information Management (ICDIM 2012), 2012

ABSTRACT This paper presents an approach for evaluating domain specific linguistic ontology. The ... more ABSTRACT This paper presents an approach for evaluating domain specific linguistic ontology. The approach used a set of questions pertaining to the internal structure of the ontology and employed to evaluate the SemQ linguistic ontology, an ontology for representing semantic oppositions in the Holy Quran. We believe following such an approach for evaluating linguistic ontologies will create a custom-specific evaluation approach underlying the needs of each ontology.

Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering(NLPKE-2010), 2010

... engineering approach to ontology building. Information Systems. 34, 258-275 (2009) [35] Al-He... more ... engineering approach to ontology building. Information Systems. 34, 258-275 (2009) [35] Al-Helwah, Nawal. Time Vocabulary in the Holy Quran: A Semantic Analysis Approach. Princess Norah University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ...