Mohamed Ahmed Sherif

Hamada M. Zahera, Rricha Jalota, Mohamed A. Sherif et al.

Social media plays a significant role in disaster management by providing valuable data about affected people, donations and help requests. Recent studies highlight the need to filter information on social media into fine-grained content labels. However, identifying useful information from massive amounts of social media posts during a crisis is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose I-AID, a multimodel approach to automatically categorize tweets into multi-label information types and filter critical information from the enormous volume of social media data. I-AID incorporates three main components: i) a BERT-based encoder to capture the semantics of a tweet and represent as a low-dimensional vector, ii) a graph attention network (GAT) to apprehend correlations between tweets' words/entities and the corresponding information types, and iii) a Relation Network as a learnable distance metric to compute the similarity between tweets and their corresponding information types in a supervised way. We conducted several experiments on two real publicly-available datasets. Our results indicate that I-AID outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of weighted average F1 score by +6% and +4% on the TREC-IS dataset and COVID-19 Tweets, respectively.

Hamada M. Zahera, Mohamed Ahmed Sherif, Axel Ngonga

Disaster prediction is one of the most critical tasks towards disaster surveillance and preparedness. Existing technologies employ different machine learning approaches to predict incoming disasters from historical environmental data. However, for short-term disasters (e.g., earthquakes), historical data alone has a limited prediction capability. Therefore, additional sources of warnings are required for accurate prediction. We consider social media as a supplementary source of knowledge in addition to historical environmental data. However, social media posts (e.g., tweets) is very informal and contains only limited content. To alleviate these limitations, we propose the combination of semantically-enriched word embedding models to represent entities in tweets with their semantic representations computed with the traditionalword2vec. Moreover, we study how the correlation between social media posts and typhoons magnitudes (also called intensities)-in terms of volume and sentiments of tweets-. Based on these insights, we propose an end-to-end based framework that learns from disaster-related tweets and environmental data to improve typhoon intensity prediction. This paper is an extension of our work originally published in K-CAP 2019 [32]. We extended this paper by building our framework with state-of-the-art deep neural models, up-dated our dataset with new typhoons and their tweets to-date and benchmark our approach against recent baselines in disaster prediction. Our experimental results show that our approach outperforms the accuracy of the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of F1-score with (CNN by12.1%and BiLSTM by3.1%) improvement compared with last experiments

Diego Moussallem, Mohamed Ahmed Sherif, Diego Esteves et al.

In this paper, we describe the LIDIOMS data set, a multilingual RDF representation of idioms currently containing five languages: English, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. The data set is intended to support natural language processing applications by providing links between idioms across languages. The underlying data was crawled and integrated from various sources. To ensure the quality of the crawled data, all idioms were evaluated by at least two native speakers. Herein, we present the model devised for structuring the data. We also provide the details of linking LIDIOMS to well-known multilingual data sets such as BabelNet. The resulting data set complies with best practices according to Linguistic Linked Open Data Community.