Machine learning is as growing as fast as concepts such as Big data and the field of data science in general. The purpose of the systematic review was to analyze scholarly articles that were published between 2015 and 2018 addressing or implementing supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques in different problem-solving paradigms. Using the elements of PRISMA, the review process identified 84 scholarly articles that had been published in different journals. Of the 84 articles, 6 were published before 2015 despite their metadata indicating that they were published in 2015. The existence of the six articles in the final papers was attributed to errors in indexing. Nonetheless, from the reviewed papers, decision tree, support vector machine, and Naive Bayes algorithms appeared to be the most cited, discussed, and implemented supervised learners. Conversely, k-means, hierarchical clustering, and principal component analysis also emerged as the commonly used unsupervised learners. The review also revealed other commonly used algorithms that include ensembles and reinforce learners, and future systematic reviews can focus on them because of the developments that machine learning and data science is undergoing at the moment.

A Systematic Review on Supervised and Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithms for Data Science

As more and more Arabic textual information becomes available through the Web in homes and businesses, via Internet and Intranet services, there is an urgent need for technologies and tools to process the relevant information. Named Entity Recognition NER is an Information Extraction task that has become an integral part of many other Natural Language Processing NLP tasks, such as Machine Translation and Information Retrieval. Arabic NER has begun to receive attention in recent years. The characteristics and peculiarities of Arabic, a member of the Semitic languages family, make dealing with NER a challenge. The performance of an Arabic NER component affects the overall performance of the NLP system in a positive manner. This article attempts to describe and detail the recent increase in interest and progress made in Arabic NER research. The importance of the NER task is demonstrated, the main characteristics of the Arabic language are highlighted, and the aspects of standardization in annotating named entities are illustrated. Moreover, the different Arabic linguistic resources are presented and the approaches used in Arabic NER field are explained. The features of common tools used in Arabic NER are described, and standard evaluation metrics are illustrated. In addition, a review of the state of the art of Arabic NER research is discussed. Finally, we present our conclusions. Throughout the presentation, illustrative examples are used for clarification.

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A survey of arabic named entity recognition and classification

Named entity recognition (NER) is the problem of locating and categorizing important nouns and proper nouns in a text. In this chapter, we review the general state of research on entity recognition, relevant challenges and the current state of the art works on named entity recognition on Semitic languages. Specifically, we look into two case studies for Arabic and Hebrew. We also review Semitic NLP tasks which overlap with the named entity recognition. We close with an overview of the available resources for Semitic named entity recognition and some the open.research questions.

Named Entity Recognition

Microorganisms are ubiquitous and closely related to people's daily lives. Since they were first discovered in the 19th century, researchers have shown great interest in microorganisms. People studied microorganisms through cultivation, but this method is expensive and time consuming. However, the cultivation method cannot keep a pace with the development of high-throughput sequencing technology. To deal with this problem, machine learning (ML) methods have been widely applied to the field of microbiology. Literature reviews have shown that ML can be used in many aspects of microbiology research, especially classification problems, and for exploring the interaction between microorganisms and the surrounding environment. In this study, we summarize the application of ML in microbiology.

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Application of Machine Learning in Microbiology.

With the growing importance of microbiome research, there is increasing evidence that host variation in microbial communities is associated with overall host health. Advancement in genetic sequencing methods for microbiomes has coincided with improvements in machine learning, with important implications for disease risk prediction in humans. One aspect specific to microbiome prediction is the use of taxonomy-informed feature selection. In this review for non-experts, we explore the most commonly used machine learning methods, and evaluate their prediction accuracy as applied to microbiome host trait prediction. Methods are described at an introductory level, and R/Python code for the analyses is provided.

A Review and Tutorial of Machine Learning Methods for Microbiome Host Trait Prediction

We present CAMeL Tools, a collection of open-source tools for Arabic natural language processing in Python. CAMeL Tools currently provides utilities for pre-processing, morphological modeling, Dialect Identification, Named Entity Recognition and Sentiment Analysis. In this paper, we describe the design of CAMeL Tools and the functionalities it provides.

CAMeL tools: An open source python toolkit for arabic natural language processing

In this paper, we propose a hybrid named entity recognition (NER) approach that takes the advantages of rule-based and machine learning-based approaches in order to improve the overall system performance and overcome the knowledge elicitation bottleneck and the lack of resources for underdeveloped languages that require deep language processing, such as Arabic. The complexity of Arabic poses special challenges to researchers of Arabic NER, which is essential for both monolingual and multilingual applications. We used the hybrid approach to develop an Arabic NER system that is capable of recognizing 11 types of Arabic named entities: Person, Location, Organization, Date, Time, Price, Measurement, Percent, Phone Number, ISBN and File Name. Extensive experiments were conducted using decision trees, Support Vector Machines and logistic regression classifiers to evaluate the system performance. The empirical results indicate that the hybrid approach outperforms both the rule-based and the ML-based approaches when they are processed independently. More importantly, our system outperforms the state-of-the-art of Arabic NER in terms of accuracy when applied to ANERcorp standard dataset, with F-measures 0.94 for Person, 0.90 for Location and 0.88 for Organization.

A hybrid approach to Arabic named entity recognition

What is a healthy microbiome? The pursuit of this and many related questions, especially in light of the recently recognized microbial component in a wide range of diseases has sparked a surge in metagenomic studies. They are often not simply attributable to a single pathogen but rather are the result of complex ecological processes. Relatedly, the increasing DNA sequencing depth and number of samples in metagenomic case-control studies enabled the applicability of powerful statistical methods, e.g. Machine Learning approaches. For the latter, the feature space is typically shaped by the relative abundances of operational taxonomic units, as determined by cost-effective phylogenetic marker gene profiles. While a substantial body of microbiome/microbiota research involves unsupervised and supervised Machine Learning, very little attention has been put on feature selection and engineering. We here propose the first algorithm to exploit phylogenetic hierarchy (i.e. an all-encompassing taxonomy) in feature engineering for microbiota classification. The rationale is to exploit the often mono- or oligophyletic distribution of relevant (but hidden) traits by virtue of taxonomic abstraction. The algorithm is embedded in a comprehensive microbiota classification pipeline, which we applied to a diverse range of datasets, distinguishing healthy from diseased microbiota samples. We demonstrate substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art microbiota classification tools in terms of classification accuracy, regardless of the actual Machine Learning technique while using drastically reduced feature spaces. Moreover, generalized features bear great explanatory value: they provide a concise description of conditions and thus help to provide pathophysiological insights. Indeed, the automatically and reproducibly derived features are consistent with previously published domain expert analyses.

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Taxonomy-aware feature engineering for microbiome classification.

Most Arabic Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems have been developed using either of two approaches: a rule-based or Machine Learning (ML) based approach, with their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, the problem of Arabic NER is tackled through integrating the two approaches together in a pipelined process to create a hybrid system with the aim of enhancing the overall performance of NER tasks. The proposed system is capable of recognizing 11 different types of named entities (NEs): Person, Location, Organization, Date, Time, Price, Measurement, Percent, Phone Number, ISBN and File Name. Extensive experiments are conducted using three different ML classifiers to evaluate the overall performance of the hybrid system. The empirical results indicate that the hybrid approach outperforms both the rule-based and the ML-based approaches. Moreover, our system outperforms the state-of-the-art of Arabic NER in terms of accuracy when applied to ANERcorp dataset, with f-measures 94.4% for Person, 90.1% for Location, and 88.2% for Organization.

A Pipeline Arabic Named Entity Recognition using a Hybrid Approach

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an essential task for many natural language processing systems, which makes use of various linguistic resources. NER becomes more complicated when the language in use is morphologically rich and structurally complex, such as Arabic. This language has a set of characteristics that makes it particularly challenging to handle. In a previous work, we have proposed an Arabic NER system that follows the hybrid approach, i.e. integrates both rule-based and machine learning-based NER approaches. Our hybrid NER system is the state-of-the-art in Arabic NER according to its performance on standard evaluation datasets. In this article, we discuss a novel methodology for overcoming the coverage drawback of rule-based NER systems in order to improve their performance and allow for automated rule update. The presented mechanism utilizes the recognition decisions made by the hybrid NER system in order to identify the weaknesses of the rule-based component and derive new linguistic rules aiming at enhancing the rule base, which will help in achieving more reliable and accurate results. We used ACE 2004 Newswire standard dataset as a resource for extracting and analyzing new linguistic rules for person, location and organization names recognition. We formulate each new rule based on two distinctive feature groups, i.e. Gazetteers of each type of named entities and Part-of-Speech tags, in particular noun and proper noun. Fourteen new patterns are derived, formulated as grammar rules, and evaluated in terms of coverage. The conducted experiments exploit a POS tagged version of the ACE 2004 NW dataset. The empirical results show that the performance of the enhanced rule-based system, i.e. NERA 2.0, improves the coverage of the previously misclassified person, location and organization named entities types by 69.93 per cent, 57.09 per cent and 54.28 per cent, respectively.

Mai Oudah

Papers

CAMeL tools: An open source python toolkit for arabic natural language processing

A hybrid approach to Arabic named entity recognition

Taxonomy-aware feature engineering for microbiome classification.

A Pipeline Arabic Named Entity Recognition using a Hybrid Approach

NERA 2.0: Improving coverage and performance of rule-based named entity recognition for Arabic*