Muhammad Nabeel Asim

Kaito Shiku, Ahtisham Fazeel Abbasi, Ryoma Bise et al.

Histology-based single-cell spatial transcriptomics (ST) estimation aims to predict gene expression for individual cells from histopathological images and cell locations, reducing the need for costly single-cell ST measurements. Unlike existing histology-to-ST methods that mainly predict spot-level profiles for local regions containing multiple cells, this task requires modeling cell-to-cell expression variability, which is strongly structured by cell type. We propose Genomics-Guided Cell-Type-Specific Mixture-of-Experts (GC-MoE), which estimates cell-type probabilities with a routing network and softly combines cell-type-specific experts for gene expression prediction. To further encode cell-type-dependent gene programs, we introduce the Cell-Type-Specific Co-Expression-Aware Predictor (CAP), together with a lightweight Cell-to-Cell Interaction Attention (C2CA) module for neighboring-cell context. Experiments and ablations on public single-cell ST datasets show consistent improvements over existing single-cell and adapted spot-level baselines.

Pervaiz Iqbal Khan, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Andreas Dengel et al.

An ever-increasing amount of social media content requires advanced AI-based computer programs capable of extracting useful information. Specifically, the extraction of health-related content from social media is useful for the development of diverse types of applications including disease spread, mortality rate prediction, and finding the impact of diverse types of drugs on diverse types of diseases. Language models are competent in extracting the syntactic and semantics of text. However, they face a hard time extracting similar patterns from social media texts. The primary reason for this shortfall lies in the non-standardized writing style commonly employed by social media users. Following the need for an optimal language model competent in extracting useful patterns from social media text, the key goal of this paper is to train language models in such a way that they learn to derive generalized patterns. The key goal is achieved through the incorporation of random weighted perturbation and contrastive learning strategies. On top of a unique training strategy, a meta predictor is proposed that reaps the benefits of 5 different language models for discriminating posts of social media text into non-health and health-related classes. Comprehensive experimentation across 3 public benchmark datasets reveals that the proposed training strategy improves the performance of the language models up to 3.87%, in terms of F1-score, as compared to their performance with traditional training. Furthermore, the proposed meta predictor outperforms existing health mention classification predictors across all 3 benchmark datasets.

Saif ur Rehman Khan, Imad Ahmed Waqar, Arooj Zaib et al.

Structural damage detection is essential for maintaining the safety and reliability of civil infrastructure. However, accurately identifying different types of structural damage from images remains challenging due to variations in damage patterns and environmental conditions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes MS-SSE-Net, a novel deep learning (DL) framework for structural damage classification. The proposed model is built upon the DenseNet201 backbone and integrates novel multi-scale feature extraction with channel and spatial attention mechanisms (MS-SSE-Net). Specifically, parallel depthwise convolutions capture both local and contextual features, while squeeze-and-excitation style channel attention and spatial attention emphasize informative regions and suppress irrelevant noise. The refined features are then processed through global average pooling and a fully connected classification layer to generate the final predictions. Experiments are conducted on the StructDamage dataset containing multiple structural damage categories. The proposed MS-SSE-Net demonstrates superior performance compared with the baseline DenseNet201 and other comparative approaches. Specifically, the proposed method achieves 99.31% precision, 99.25% recall, 99.27% F1-score, and 99.26% accuracy, outperforming the baseline model which achieved 98.62% precision, 98.53% recall, 98.58% F1-score, and 98.53% accuracy.

Hasaan Maqsood, Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Sebastian Vollmer et al.

Diabetic retinopathy screening traditionally relies on fundus photography, requiring specialized equipment and expertise often unavailable in primary care and resource limited settings. We developed and validated a deep learning (DL) system for automated diabetic classification using anterior segment ocular imaging a readily accessible alternative utilizing standard photography equipment. The system leverages visible biomarkers in the iris, sclera, and conjunctiva that correlate with systemic diabetic status. We systematically evaluated five contemporary architectures (EfficientNet-V2-S with self-supervised learning (SSL), Vision Transformer, Swin Transformer, ConvNeXt-Base, and ResNet-50) on 2,640 clinically annotated anterior segment images spanning Normal, Controlled Diabetic, and Uncontrolled Diabetic categories. A tailored preprocessing pipeline combining specular reflection mitigation and contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) was implemented to enhance subtle vascular and textural patterns critical for classification. SSL using SimCLR on domain specific ocular images substantially improved model performance.EfficientNet-V2-S with SSL achieved optimal performance with an F1-score of 98.21%, precision of 97.90%, and recall of 98.55% a substantial improvement over ImageNet only initialization (94.63% F1). Notably, the model attained near perfect precision (100%) for Normal classification, critical for minimizing unnecessary clinical referrals.

Hasaan Maqsood, Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Sebastian Vollmer et al.

Accurate segmentation of brain tumour sub-regions from multi-parametric MRI is critical for treatment planning yet remains challenging due to morphological variability, class imbalance, and overlapping appearances of tumour regions across imaging sequences. We propose SegGuidedNet, a three-dimensional residual encoder--decoder network introducing a novel SegAttentionGate module that explicitly supervises the decoder to produce spatially discriminative attention maps for each tumour sub-region necrotic core, peritumoral oedema, and enhancing tumour via a lightweight auxiliary loss, adding less than 0.2% parameter overhead. This sub-region supervision maintains decoder discriminability between visually ambiguous classes while providing free-of-cost spatial interpretability at inference without any post-hoc explanation method. Evaluated independently on BraTS2021 and BraTS2023 GLI across 251 held-out subjects each, SegGuidedNet achieves mean Dice of 0.905 (ET= 0.873, TC=0.906, WT=0.935) and 0.897 (ET=0.859, TC=0.902, WT=0.931) respectively, surpassing ensemble-based nnU-Net and HNF-Netv2 as a single model and approaching Swin UNETR a 10-model ensemble within 2--4 Dice points at a fraction of the inference cost. The consistency of results across two benchmark editions further confirms the generalisability of the proposed approach, offering competitive accuracy with built-in interpretability in a lightweight, clinically practical framework.

Yuichiro Iwashita, Ahtisham Fazeel Abbasi, Muhammad Nabeel Asim et al.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is inherently affected by sparsity caused by dropout events, in which expressed genes are recorded as zeros due to technical limitations. These artifacts distort gene expression distributions and can compromise downstream analyses. Numerous imputation methods have been proposed to address this, and these methods encompass a wide range of approaches from traditional statistical models to recently developed deep learning (DL)-based methods. However, their comparative performance remains unclear, as existing benchmarking studies typically evaluate only a limited subset of methods, datasets, and downstream analytical tasks. Here, we present a comprehensive benchmark of 15 scRNA-seq imputation methods spanning 7 methodological categories, including traditional and modern DL-based methods. These methods are evaluated across 30 datasets sourced from 10 experimental protocols and assessed in terms of 6 downstream analytical tasks. Our results show that traditional imputation methods, such as model-based, smoothing-based, and low-rank matrix-based methods, generally outperform DL-based methods, such as diffusion-based, GAN-based, GNN-based, and autoencoder-based methods. In addition, strong performance in numerical gene expression recovery does not necessarily translate into improved biological interpretability in downstream analyses. Furthermore, the performance of imputation methods varies substantially across datasets, protocols, and downstream analytical tasks, and no single method consistently outperforms others across all evaluation scenarios. Together, our results provide practical guidance for selecting imputation methods tailored to specific analytical objectives and highlight the importance of task-specific evaluation when assessing imputation performance in scRNA-seq data analysis.

Misbah Ijaz, Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Abd Ur Rehman et al.

Automated detection and classification of structural cracks and surface defects is a critical challenge in civil engineering, infrastructure maintenance, and heritage preservation. Recent advances in Computer Vision (CV) and Deep Learning (DL) have significantly improved automatic crack detection. However, these methods rely heavily on large, diverse, and carefully curated datasets that include various crack types across different surface materials. Many existing public crack datasets lack geographic diversity, surface types, scale, and labeling consistency, making it challenging for trained algorithms to generalize effectively in real world conditions. We provide a novel dataset, StructDamage, a curated collection of approximately 78,093 images spanning nine surface types: walls, tile, stone, road, pavement, deck, concrete, and brick. The dataset was constructed by systematically aggregating, harmonizing, and reannotating images from 32 publicly available datasets covering concrete structures, asphalt pavements, masonry walls, bridges, and historic buildings. All images are organized in a folder level classification hierarchy suitable for training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers. To highlight the practical value of the dataset, we present baseline classification results using fifteen DL architectures from six model families, with twelve achieving macro F1-scores over 0.96. The best performing model DenseNet201 achieves 98.62% accuracy. The proposed dataset provides a comprehensive and versatile resource suitable for classification tasks. With thorough documentation and a standard structure, it is designed to promote reproducible research and support the development and fair evaluation of robust crack damage detection approaches.

Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Sebastian Vollmer et al.

Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of blindness in diabetic patients and early detection plays a crucial role in preventing vision loss. Traditional diagnostic methods are often time-consuming and prone to errors. The emergence of deep learning techniques has provided innovative solutions to improve diagnostic efficiency. However, single deep learning models frequently face issues related to extracting key features from complex retinal images. To handle this problem, we present an effective ensemble method for DR diagnosis comprising four main phases: image pre-processing, selection of backbone pre-trained models, feature enhancement, and optimization. Our methodology initiates with the pre-processing phase, where we apply CLAHE to enhance image contrast and Gamma correction is then used to adjust the brightness for better feature recognition. We then apply Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for image fusion by combining multi-resolution details to create a richer dataset. Then, we selected three pre-trained models with the best performance named DenseNet169, MobileNetV1, and Xception for diverse feature extraction. To further improve feature extraction, an improved residual block is integrated into each model. Finally, the predictions from these base models are then aggregated using weighted ensemble approach, with the weights optimized by using Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA).SSA intelligently explores the weight space and finds the optimal configuration of base architectures to maximize the performance of the ensemble model. The proposed model is evaluated on the multiclass Kaggle APTOS 2019 dataset and obtained 88.52% accuracy.

Misbah Ijaz, Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Abd Ur Rehman et al.

The increasing global deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems needs robust, scalable, and automated inspection technologies capable of detecting a wide range of panel flaws under a variety of operating situations. The lack of large-scale, multi-modal, publicly available annotated datasets is a major obstacle preventing advancement in this field. We introduce SolarFCD, an extensive dataset of solar panel defects created by methodically combining and reconciling three publicly accessible datasets covering two imaging modalities: RGB/Drone images and Thermal Infrared. The dataset consist of 4,435 images arranged under four unified defect classes such as: healthy images, Surface Obstruction, structural fault, and electrical fault. The dataset was divided into training, validation, and test splits at an 80:10:10 ratio through methodical label mapping, near-duplicate removal, and targeted augmentation of minority classes. Sixteen classification architectures from five design families were trained and assessed on the dataset to provide repeatable benchmark baselines. With an accuracy of 86.68%, precision of 88.65%, recall of 88.62%, and F1-score of 88.17%, ResNet101V2 performed the best overall. Per-class results showed balanced detection across all four defect categories within a narrow performance band of less than 1.2 percentage points. To promote open and repeatable research in automated PV inspection and solar energy operations and maintenance, the dataset, annotation files, and baseline code are made openly available.

Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Sebastian Vollmer et al.

The framework is designed to improve performance in the analysis of combined as well as single anatomical perspectives for MRI disease diagnosis. It specifically addresses the performance degradation observed in state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, particularly when processing axial, coronal, and sagittal anatomical planes. The paper introduces the FOLC-Net framework, which incorporates a novel federated-optimized lightweight architecture with approximately 1.217 million parameters and a storage requirement of only 0.9 MB. FOLC-Net integrates Manta-ray foraging optimization (MRFO) mechanisms for efficient model structure generation, global model cloning for scalable training, and ConvNeXt for enhanced client adaptability. The model was evaluated on combined multi-view data as well as individual views, such as axial, coronal, and sagittal, to assess its robustness in various medical imaging scenarios. Moreover, FOLC-Net tests a ShallowFed model on different data to evaluate its ability to generalize beyond the training dataset. The results show that FOLC-Net outperforms existing models, particularly in the challenging sagittal view. For instance, FOLC-Net achieved an accuracy of 92.44% on the sagittal view, significantly higher than the 88.37% accuracy of study method (DL + Residual Learning) and 88.95% of DL models. Additionally, FOLC-Net demonstrated improved accuracy across all individual views, providing a more reliable and robust solution for medical image analysis in decentralized environments. FOLC-Net addresses the limitations of existing SOTA models by providing a framework that ensures better adaptability to individual views while maintaining strong performance in multi-view settings. The incorporation of MRFO, global model cloning, and ConvNeXt ensures that FOLC-Net performs better in real-world medical applications.

Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Sebastian Vollmer et al.

Medical disease prediction, particularly through imaging, remains a challenging task due to the complexity and variability of medical data, including noise, ambiguity, and differing image quality. Recent deep learning models, including Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods, have shown promising results in brain tumor image identification but still face limitations in handling uncertainty and generalizing across diverse medical conditions. Traditional KD methods often rely on a context-unaware temperature parameter to soften teacher model predictions, which does not adapt effectively to varying uncertainty levels present in medical images. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that integrates Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for optimal teacher-student model selection and a novel context-aware predictor approach for temperature scaling. The proposed context-aware framework adjusts the temperature based on factors such as image quality, disease complexity, and teacher model confidence, allowing for more robust knowledge transfer. Additionally, ACO efficiently selects the most appropriate teacher-student model pair from a set of pre-trained models, outperforming current optimization methods by exploring a broader solution space and better handling complex, non-linear relationships within the data. The proposed framework is evaluated using three publicly available benchmark datasets, each corresponding to a distinct medical imaging task. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving top accuracy rates: 98.01% on the MRI brain tumor (Kaggle) dataset, 92.81% on the Figshare MRI dataset, and 96.20% on the GastroNet dataset. This enhanced performance is further evidenced by the improved results, surpassing existing benchmarks of 97.24% (Kaggle), 91.43% (Figshare), and 95.00% (GastroNet).

Summra Saleem, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Shaista Zulfiqar et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) by automating traditional labor-intensive tasks and consequently accelerated the development of computer-aided applications. As researchers continue to advance this field with the introduction of novel language models and more efficient training/finetuning methodologies, the idea of prompt engineering and subsequent optimization strategies with LLMs has emerged as a particularly impactful trend to yield a substantial performance boost across diverse NLP tasks. To best of our knowledge numerous review articles have explored prompt engineering, however, a critical gap exists in comprehensive analyses of prompt optimization strategies. To bridge this gap this paper provides unique and comprehensive insights about the potential of diverse prompt optimization strategies. It analyzes their underlying working paradigms and based on these principles, categorizes them into 11 distinct classes. Moreover, the paper provides details about various NLP tasks where these prompt optimization strategies have been employed, along with details of different LLMs and benchmark datasets used for evaluation. This comprehensive compilation lays a robust foundation for future comparative studies and enables rigorous assessment of prompt optimization and LLM-based predictive pipelines under consistent experimental settings: a critical need in the current landscape. Ultimately, this research will centralize diverse strategic knowledge to facilitate the adaptation of existing prompt optimization strategies for development of innovative predictors across unexplored tasks.

Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Sebastian Vollmer et al.

This paper presents the FuzzyDistillViT-MobileNet model, a novel approach for lung cancer (LC) classification, leveraging dynamic fuzzy logic-driven knowledge distillation (KD) to address uncertainty and complexity in disease diagnosis. Unlike traditional models that rely on static KD with fixed weights, our method dynamically adjusts the distillation weight using fuzzy logic, enabling the student model to focus on high-confidence regions while reducing attention to ambiguous areas. This dynamic adjustment improves the model ability to handle varying uncertainty levels across different regions of LC images. We employ the Vision Transformer (ViT-B32) as the instructor model, which effectively transfers knowledge to the student model, MobileNet, enhancing the student generalization capabilities. The training process is further optimized using a dynamic wait adjustment mechanism that adapts the training procedure for improved convergence and performance. To enhance image quality, we introduce pixel-level image fusion improvement techniques such as Gamma correction and Histogram Equalization. The processed images (Pix1 and Pix2) are fused using a wavelet-based fusion method to improve image resolution and feature preservation. This fusion method uses the wavedec2 function to standardize images to a 224x224 resolution, decompose them into multi-scale frequency components, and recursively average coefficients at each level for better feature representation. To address computational efficiency, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to select the most suitable pre-trained student model from a pool of 12 candidates, balancing model performance with computational cost. The model is evaluated on two datasets, including LC25000 histopathological images (99.16% accuracy) and IQOTH/NCCD CT-scan images (99.54% accuracy), demonstrating robustness across different imaging domains.

Saif Ur Rehman Khan, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Sebastian Vollmer et al.

Early diagnosis of plant diseases is critical for global food safety, yet most AI solutions lack the generalization required for real-world agricultural diversity. These models are typically constrained to specific species, failing to perform accurately across the broad spectrum of cultivated plants. To address this gap, we first introduce the FloraSyntropy Archive, a large-scale dataset of 178,922 images across 35 plant species, annotated with 97 distinct disease classes. We establish a benchmark by evaluating numerous existing models on this archive, revealing a significant performance gap. We then propose FloraSyntropy-Net, a novel federated learning framework (FL) that integrates a Memetic Algorithm (MAO) for optimal base model selection (DenseNet201), a novel Deep Block for enhanced feature representation, and a client-cloning strategy for scalable, privacy-preserving training. FloraSyntropy-Net achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 96.38% on the FloraSyntropy benchmark. Crucially, to validate its generalization capability, we test the model on the unrelated multiclass Pest dataset, where it demonstrates exceptional adaptability, achieving 99.84% accuracy. This work provides not only a valuable new resource but also a robust and highly generalizable framework that advances the field towards practical, large-scale agricultural AI applications.

Faiza Hassan, Summra Saleem, Kashif Javed et al.

Multifarious intent detection predictors are developed for different languages, including English, Chinese and French, however, the field remains underdeveloped for Urdu, the 10th most spoken language. In the realm of well-known languages, intent detection predictors utilize the strategy of few-shot learning and prediction of unseen classes based on the model training on seen classes. However, Urdu language lacks few-shot strategy based intent detection predictors and traditional predictors are focused on prediction of the same classes which models have seen in the train set. To empower Urdu language specific intent detection, this introduces a unique contrastive learning approach that leverages unlabeled Urdu data to re-train pre-trained language models. This re-training empowers LLMs representation learning for the downstream intent detection task. Finally, it reaps the combined potential of pre-trained LLMs and the prototype-informed attention mechanism to create a comprehensive end-to-end LLMPIA intent detection pipeline. Under the paradigm of proposed predictive pipeline, it explores the potential of 6 distinct language models and 13 distinct similarity computation methods. The proposed framework is evaluated on 2 public benchmark datasets, namely ATIS encompassing 5836 samples and Web Queries having 8519 samples. Across ATIS dataset under 4-way 1 shot and 4-way 5 shot experimental settings LLMPIA achieved 83.28% and 98.25% F1-Score and on Web Queries dataset produced 76.23% and 84.42% F1-Score, respectively. In an additional case study on the Web Queries dataset under same classes train and test set settings, LLMPIA outperformed state-of-the-art predictor by 53.55% F1-Score.

Summra Saleem, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Andreas Dengel

Early detection and resolution of duplicate and conflicting requirements can significantly enhance project efficiency and overall software quality. Researchers have developed various computational predictors by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) potential to detect duplicate and conflicting requirements. However, these predictors lack in performance and requires more effective approaches to empower software development processes. Following the need of a unique predictor that can accurately identify duplicate and conflicting requirements, this research offers a comprehensive framework that facilitate development of 3 different types of predictive pipelines: language models based, multi-model similarity knowledge-driven and large language models (LLMs) context + multi-model similarity knowledge-driven. Within first type predictive pipelines landscape, framework facilitates conflicting/duplicate requirements identification by leveraging 8 distinct types of LLMs. In second type, framework supports development of predictive pipelines that leverage multi-scale and multi-model similarity knowledge, ranging from traditional similarity computation methods to advanced similarity vectors generated by LLMs. In the third type, the framework synthesizes predictive pipelines by integrating contextual insights from LLMs with multi-model similarity knowledge. Across 6 public benchmark datasets, extensive testing of 760 distinct predictive pipelines demonstrates that hybrid predictive pipelines consistently outperforms other two types predictive pipelines in accurately identifying duplicate and conflicting requirements. This predictive pipeline outperformed existing state-of-the-art predictors performance with an overall performance margin of 13% in terms of F1-score

Summra Saleem, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Ludger Van Elst et al.

Traditional language models have been extensively evaluated for software engineering domain, however the potential of ChatGPT and Gemini have not been fully explored. To fulfill this gap, the paper in hand presents a comprehensive case study to investigate the potential of both language models for development of diverse types of requirement engineering applications. It deeply explores impact of varying levels of expert knowledge prompts on the prediction accuracies of both language models. Across 4 different public benchmark datasets of requirement engineering tasks, it compares performance of both language models with existing task specific machine/deep learning predictors and traditional language models. Specifically, the paper utilizes 4 benchmark datasets; Pure (7,445 samples, requirements extraction),PROMISE (622 samples, requirements classification), REQuestA (300 question answer (QA) pairs) and Aerospace datasets (6347 words, requirements NER tagging). Our experiments reveal that, in comparison to ChatGPT, Gemini requires more careful prompt engineering to provide accurate predictions. Moreover, across requirement extraction benchmark dataset the state-of-the-art F1-score is 0.86 while ChatGPT and Gemini achieved 0.76 and 0.77,respectively. The State-of-the-art F1-score on requirements classification dataset is 0.96 and both language models 0.78. In name entity recognition (NER) task the state-of-the-art F1-score is 0.92 and ChatGPT managed to produce 0.36, and Gemini 0.25. Similarly, across question answering dataset the state-of-the-art F1-score is 0.90 and ChatGPT and Gemini managed to produce 0.91 and 0.88 respectively. Our experiments show that Gemini requires more precise prompt engineering than ChatGPT. Except for question-answering, both models under-perform compared to current state-of-the-art predictors across other tasks.

Faiza Memood, Muhammad Usman Ghani, Muhammad Ali Ibrahim et al.

In order to accelerate the performance of various Natural Language Processing tasks for Roman Urdu, this paper for the very first time provides 3 neural word embeddings prepared using most widely used approaches namely Word2vec, FastText, and Glove. The integrity of generated neural word embeddings is evaluated using intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation approaches. Considering the lack of publicly available benchmark datasets, it provides a first-ever Roman Urdu dataset which consists of 3241 sentiments annotated against positive, negative and neutral classes. To provide benchmark baseline performance over the presented dataset, we adapt diverse machine learning (Support Vector Machine Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes), deep learning (convolutional neural network, recurrent neural network), and hybrid approaches. Effectiveness of generated neural word embeddings is evaluated by comparing the performance of machine and deep learning based methodologies using 7, and 5 distinct feature representation approaches respectively. Finally, it proposes a novel precisely extreme multi-channel hybrid methodology which outperforms state-of-the-art adapted machine and deep learning approaches by the figure of 9%, and 4% in terms of F1-score. Roman Urdu Sentiment Analysis, Pretrain word embeddings for Roman Urdu, Word2Vec, Glove, Fast-Text

Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Muhammad Usman Ghani, Muhammad Ali Ibrahim et al.

In order to provide benchmark performance for Urdu text document classification, the contribution of this paper is manifold. First, it pro-vides a publicly available benchmark dataset manually tagged against 6 classes. Second, it investigates the performance impact of traditional machine learning based Urdu text document classification methodologies by embedding 10 filter-based feature selection algorithms which have been widely used for other languages. Third, for the very first time, it as-sesses the performance of various deep learning based methodologies for Urdu text document classification. In this regard, for experimentation, we adapt 10 deep learning classification methodologies which have pro-duced best performance figures for English text classification. Fourth, it also investigates the performance impact of transfer learning by utiliz-ing Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers approach for Urdu language. Fifth, it evaluates the integrity of a hybrid approach which combines traditional machine learning based feature engineering and deep learning based automated feature engineering. Experimental results show that feature selection approach named as Normalised Dif-ference Measure along with Support Vector Machine outshines state-of-the-art performance on two closed source benchmark datasets CLE Urdu Digest 1000k, and CLE Urdu Digest 1Million with a significant margin of 32%, and 13% respectively. Across all three datasets, Normalised Differ-ence Measure outperforms other filter based feature selection algorithms as it significantly uplifts the performance of all adopted machine learning, deep learning, and hybrid approaches. The source code and presented dataset are available at Github repository.

Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Muhammad Usman Ghani Khan, Muhammad Imran Malik et al.

Text document classification is an important task for diverse natural language processing based applications. Traditional machine learning approaches mainly focused on reducing dimensionality of textual data to perform classification. This although improved the overall classification accuracy, the classifiers still faced sparsity problem due to lack of better data representation techniques. Deep learning based text document classification, on the other hand, benefitted greatly from the invention of word embeddings that have solved the sparsity problem and researchers focus mainly remained on the development of deep architectures. Deeper architectures, however, learn some redundant features that limit the performance of deep learning based solutions. In this paper, we propose a two stage text document classification methodology which combines traditional feature engineering with automatic feature engineering (using deep learning). The proposed methodology comprises a filter based feature selection (FSE) algorithm followed by a deep convolutional neural network. This methodology is evaluated on the two most commonly used public datasets, i.e., 20 Newsgroups data and BBC news data. Evaluation results reveal that the proposed methodology outperforms the state-of-the-art of both the (traditional) machine learning and deep learning based text document classification methodologies with a significant margin of 7.7% on 20 Newsgroups and 6.6% on BBC news datasets.