Areej Alhothali

Tarik Alafif, Anas Hadi, Manal Allahyani et al.

Individual abnormal behaviors vary depending on crowd sizes, contexts, and scenes. Challenges such as partial occlusions, blurring, large-number abnormal behavior, and camera viewing occur in large-scale crowds when detecting, tracking, and recognizing individuals with abnormal behaviors. In this paper, our contribution is twofold. First, we introduce an annotated and labeled large-scale crowd abnormal behaviors Hajj dataset (HAJJv2). Second, we propose two methods of hybrid Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Random Forests (RFs) to detect and recognize Spatio-temporal abnormal behaviors in small and large-scales crowd videos. In small-scale crowd videos, a ResNet-50 pre-trained CNN model is fine-tuned to verify whether every frame is normal or abnormal in the spatial domain. If anomalous behaviors are observed, a motion-based individuals detection method based on the magnitudes and orientations of Horn-Schunck optical flow is used to locate and track individuals with abnormal behaviors. A Kalman filter is employed in large-scale crowd videos to predict and track the detected individuals in the subsequent frames. Then, means, variances, and standard deviations statistical features are computed and fed to the RF to classify individuals with abnormal behaviors in the temporal domain. In large-scale crowds, we fine-tune the ResNet-50 model using YOLOv2 object detection technique to detect individuals with abnormal behaviors in the spatial domain.

Hessa Abdulrahman Alawwad, Areej Alhothali, Usman Naseem et al.

Textbook question answering (TQA) is a challenging task in artificial intelligence due to the complex nature of context needed to answer complex questions. Although previous research has improved the task, there are still some limitations in textual TQA, including weak reasoning and inability to capture contextual information in the lengthy context. We propose a framework (PLRTQA) that incorporates the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technique to handle the out-of-domain scenario where concepts are spread across different lessons, and utilize transfer learning to handle the long context and enhance reasoning abilities. Our architecture outperforms the baseline, achieving an accuracy improvement of 4. 12% in the validation set and 9. 84% in the test set for textual multiple-choice questions. While this paper focuses on solving challenges in the textual TQA, It provides a foundation for future work in multimodal TQA where the visual components are integrated to address more complex educational scenarios. Code: https://github.com/hessaAlawwad/PLR-TQA

Sumaiya Ali, Areej Alhothali, Ohoud Alzamzami et al.

Placenta Accreta Spectrum (PAS) is a serious obstetric condition that can be challenging to diagnose with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) due to variability in radiologists' interpretations. To overcome this challenge, a hybrid 3D deep learning model for automated PAS detection from volumetric MRI scans is proposed in this study. The model integrates a 3D DenseNet121 to capture local features and a 3D Vision Transformer (ViT) to model global spatial context. It was developed and evaluated on a retrospective dataset of 1,133 MRI volumes. Multiple 3D deep learning architectures were also evaluated for comparison. On an independent test set, the DenseNet121-ViT model achieved the highest performance with a five-run average accuracy of 84.3%. These results highlight the strength of hybrid CNN-Transformer models as a computer-aided diagnosis tool. The model's performance demonstrates a clear potential to assist radiologists by providing a robust decision support to improve diagnostic consistency across interpretations, and ultimately enhance the accuracy and timeliness of PAS diagnosis.

Sumaiya Ali, Areej Alhothali, Sameera Albasri et al.

Placenta Accreta Spectrum (PAS) is a life-threatening obstetric complication involving abnormal placental invasion into the uterine wall. Early and accurate prenatal diagnosis is essential to reduce maternal and neonatal risks. This study aimed to develop and validate a deep learning framework that enhances PAS detection by integrating multiple imaging modalities. A multimodal deep learning model was designed using an intermediate feature-level fusion architecture combining 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and 2D Ultrasound (US) scans. Unimodal feature extractors, a 3D DenseNet121-Vision Transformer for MRI and a 2D ResNet50 for US, were selected after systematic comparative analysis. Curated datasets comprising 1,293 MRI and 1,143 US scans were used to train the unimodal models and paired samples of patient-matched MRI-US scans was isolated for multimodal model development and evaluation. On an independent test set, the multimodal fusion model achieved superior performance, with an accuracy of 92.5% and an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) of 0.927, outperforming the MRI-only (82.5%, AUC 0.825) and US-only (87.5%, AUC 0.879) models. Integrating MRI and US features provides complementary diagnostic information, demonstrating strong potential to enhance prenatal risk assessment and improve patient outcomes.

Khadejaa Alshehri, Areej Alhothali, Nahed Alowidi

Speech acts are a speakers actions when performing an utterance within a conversation, such as asking, recommending, greeting, or thanking someone, expressing a thought, or making a suggestion. Understanding speech acts helps interpret the intended meaning and actions behind a speakers or writers words. This paper proposes a Twitter dialectal Arabic speech act classification approach based on a transformer deep learning neural network. Twitter and social media, are becoming more and more integrated into daily life. As a result, they have evolved into a vital source of information that represents the views and attitudes of their users. We proposed a BERT based weighted ensemble learning approach to integrate the advantages of various BERT models in dialectal Arabic speech acts classification. We compared the proposed model against several variants of Arabic BERT models and sequence-based models. We developed a dialectal Arabic tweet act dataset by annotating a subset of a large existing Arabic sentiment analysis dataset (ASAD) based on six speech act categories. We also evaluated the models on a previously developed Arabic Tweet Act dataset (ArSAS). To overcome the class imbalance issue commonly observed in speech act problems, a transformer-based data augmentation model was implemented to generate an equal proportion of speech act categories. The results show that the best BERT model is araBERTv2-Twitter models with a macro-averaged F1 score and an accuracy of 0.73 and 0.84, respectively. The performance improved using a BERT-based ensemble method with a 0.74 and 0.85 averaged F1 score and accuracy on our dataset, respectively.

Ahlam Alrehili, Areej Alhothali

Natural language processing (NLP) utilizes text data augmentation to overcome sample size constraints. Increasing the sample size is a natural and widely used strategy for alleviating these challenges. In this study, we chose Arabic to increase the sample size and correct grammatical errors. Arabic is considered one of the languages with limited resources for grammatical error correction (GEC). Furthermore, QALB-14 and QALB-15 are the only datasets used in most Arabic grammatical error correction research, with approximately 20,500 parallel examples, which is considered low compared with other languages. Therefore, this study aims to develop an Arabic corpus called "Tibyan" for grammatical error correction using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is used as a data augmenter tool based on a pair of Arabic sentences containing grammatical errors matched with a sentence free of errors extracted from Arabic books, called guide sentences. Multiple steps were involved in establishing our corpus, including the collection and pre-processing of a pair of Arabic texts from various sources, such as books and open-access corpora. We then used ChatGPT to generate a parallel corpus based on the text collected previously, as a guide for generating sentences with multiple types of errors. By engaging linguistic experts to review and validate the automatically generated sentences, we ensured that they were correct and error-free. The corpus was validated and refined iteratively based on feedback provided by linguistic experts to improve its accuracy. Finally, we used the Arabic Error Type Annotation tool (ARETA) to analyze the types of errors in the Tibyan corpus. Our corpus contained 49 of errors, including seven types: orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, punctuation, merge, and split. The Tibyan corpus contains approximately 600 K tokens.

Hessa A. Alawwad, Anas Zafar, Areej Alhothali et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown success in vision-language tasks, but their ability to reason over complex educational materials remains largely untested. This work presents the first evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs, including LLaVA-1.5 and LLaMA 3.2-Vision, on the textbook question answering (TQA) task using the CK12-QA dataset. We introduce a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline to simulate real-world learning by providing relevant lesson paragraphs and diagrams as context. Our zero-shot experiments reveal a critical trade-off: while retrieved context improves LLaVA's performance on text-based questions, it significantly degrades the accuracy of the more powerful LLaMA 3.2-Vision on diagram-based tasks, dropping its validation accuracy from 74.07% to 25.93%. We term this statistically significant phenomenon "catastrophic context interference." Furthermore, fine-tuning highlights architectural differences: LLaMA 3.2-Vision's performance improves to 71.16% on the test set, demonstrating its capacity to learn multimodal integration, whereas LLaVA's performance declines, indicating challenges with generalization. Our results underscore the challenges MLLMs face in modality prioritization and context integration, providing a benchmark and pointing to key directions for developing more robust AI-driven educational tools.

Ahlam Alrehili, Areej Alhothali

Synthetic data generation is widely recognized as a way to enhance the quality of neural grammatical error correction (GEC) systems. However, current approaches often lack diversity or are too simplistic to generate the wide range of grammatical errors made by humans, especially for low-resource languages such as Arabic. In this paper, we will develop the error tagging model and the synthetic data generation model to create a large synthetic dataset in Arabic for grammatical error correction. In the error tagging model, the correct sentence is categorized into multiple error types by using the DeBERTav3 model. Arabic Error Type Annotation tool (ARETA) is used to guide multi-label classification tasks in an error tagging model in which each sentence is classified into 26 error tags. The synthetic data generation model is a back-translation-based model that generates incorrect sentences by appending error tags before the correct sentence that was generated from the error tagging model using the ARAT5 model. In the QALB-14 and QALB-15 Test sets, the error tagging model achieved 94.42% F1, which is state-of-the-art in identifying error tags in clean sentences. As a result of our syntactic data training in grammatical error correction, we achieved a new state-of-the-art result of F1-Score: 79.36% in the QALB-14 Test set. We generate 30,219,310 synthetic sentence pairs by using a synthetic data generation model.

Ahlam Alrehili, Areej Alhothali

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is an important aspect of natural language processing. Arabic has a complicated morphological and syntactic structure, posing a greater challenge than other languages. Even though modern neural models have improved greatly in recent years, the majority of previous attempts used individual models without taking into account the potential benefits of combining different systems. In this paper, we present one of the first multi-system approaches for correcting grammatical errors in Arabic, the Arab Enhanced Edit Selection System Complication (ArbESC+). Several models are used to collect correction proposals, which are represented as numerical features in the framework. A classifier determines and implements the appropriate corrections based on these features. In order to improve output quality, the framework uses support techniques to filter overlapping corrections and estimate decision reliability. A combination of AraT5, ByT5, mT5, AraBART, AraBART+Morph+GEC, and Text editing systems gave better results than a single model alone, with F0.5 at 82.63% on QALB-14 test data, 84.64% on QALB-15 L1 data, and 65.55% on QALB-15 L2 data. As one of the most significant contributions of this work, it's the first Arab attempt to integrate linguistic error correction. Improving existing models provides a practical step towards developing advanced tools that will benefit users and researchers of Arabic text processing.

Salha Alyami, Amani Jamal, Areej Alhothali

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) in natural language processing enables organizations to understand customer opinions on specific product aspects. While deep learning models are widely used for English ABSA, their application in Arabic is limited due to the scarcity of labeled data. Researchers have attempted to tackle this issue by using pre-trained contextualized language models such as BERT. However, these models are often based on fact-based data, which can introduce bias in domain-specific tasks like ABSA. To our knowledge, no studies have applied adaptive pre-training with Arabic contextualized models for ABSA. This research proposes a novel approach using domain-adaptive pre-training for aspect-sentiment classification (ASC) and opinion target expression (OTE) extraction. We examine fine-tuning strategies - feature extraction, full fine-tuning, and adapter-based methods - to enhance performance and efficiency, utilizing multiple adaptation corpora and contextualized models. Our results show that in-domain adaptive pre-training yields modest improvements. Adapter-based fine-tuning is a computationally efficient method that achieves competitive results. However, error analyses reveal issues with model predictions and dataset labeling. In ASC, common problems include incorrect sentiment labeling, misinterpretation of contrastive markers, positivity bias for early terms, and challenges with conflicting opinions and subword tokenization. For OTE, issues involve mislabeling targets, confusion over syntactic roles, difficulty with multi-word expressions, and reliance on shallow heuristics. These findings underscore the need for syntax- and semantics-aware models, such as graph convolutional networks, to more effectively capture long-distance relations and complex aspect-based opinion alignments.

Soukeina Elhassen, Lama Al Khuzayem, Areej Alhothali et al.

Sign language (SL) is an essential communication form for hearing-impaired and deaf people, enabling engagement within the broader society. Despite its significance, limited public awareness of SL often leads to inequitable access to educational and professional opportunities, thereby contributing to social exclusion, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where over 84,000 individuals depend on Saudi Sign Language (SSL) as their primary form of communication. Although certain technological approaches have helped to improve communication for individuals with hearing impairments, there continues to be an urgent requirement for more precise and dependable translation techniques, especially for Arabic sign language variants like SSL. Most state-of-the-art solutions have primarily focused on non-Arabic sign languages, resulting in a considerable absence of resources dedicated to Arabic sign language, specifically SSL. The complexity of the Arabic language and the prevalence of isolated sign language datasets that concentrate on individual words instead of continuous speech contribute to this issue. To address this gap, our research represents an important step in developing SSL resources. To address this, we introduce the first continuous Saudi Sign Language dataset called KAU-CSSL, focusing on complete sentences to facilitate further research and enable sophisticated recognition systems for SSL recognition and translation. Additionally, we propose a transformer-based model, utilizing a pretrained ResNet-18 for spatial feature extraction and a Transformer Encoder with Bidirectional LSTM for temporal dependencies, achieving 99.02\% accuracy at signer dependent mode and 77.71\% accuracy at signer independent mode. This development leads the way to not only improving communication tools for the SSL community but also making a substantial contribution to the wider field of sign language.

Hind Aljuaid, Areej Alhothali, Ohoud Al-Zamzami et al.

Essay writing is a critical component of student assessment, yet manual scoring is labor-intensive and inconsistent. Automated Essay Scoring (AES) offers a promising alternative, but current approaches face limitations. Recent studies have incorporated Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) into AES using static word embeddings that fail to capture contextual meaning, especially for polysemous words. Additionally, many methods rely on holistic scoring, overlooking specific writing aspects such as grammar, vocabulary, and cohesion. To address these challenges, this study proposes TransGAT, a novel approach that integrates fine-tuned Transformer models with GNNs for analytic scoring. TransGAT combines the contextual understanding of Transformers with the relational modeling strength of Graph Attention Networks (GAT). It performs two-stream predictions by pairing each fine-tuned Transformer (BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTaV3) with a separate GAT. In each pair, the first stream generates essay-level predictions, while the second applies GAT to Transformer token embeddings, with edges constructed from syntactic dependencies. The model then fuses predictions from both streams to produce the final analytic score. Experiments on the ELLIPSE dataset show that TransGAT outperforms baseline models, achieving an average Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 0.854 across all analytic scoring dimensions. These findings highlight the potential of TransGAT to advance AES systems.

Hessa Alawwad, Usman Naseem, Areej Alhothali et al.

Textbook question answering (TQA) is a complex task, requiring the interpretation of complex multimodal context. Although recent advances have improved overall performance, they often encounter difficulties in educational settings where accurate semantic alignment and task-specific document retrieval are essential. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to multimodal textbook question answering by introducing a mechanism for enhancing semantic representations through multi-objective joint training. Our model, Joint Embedding Training With Ranking Supervision for Textbook Question Answering (JETRTQA), is a multimodal learning framework built on a retriever--generator architecture that uses a retrieval-augmented generation setup, in which a multimodal large language model generates answers. JETRTQA is designed to improve the relevance of retrieved documents in complex educational contexts. Unlike traditional direct scoring approaches, JETRTQA learns to refine the semantic representations of questions and documents through a supervised signal that combines pairwise ranking and implicit supervision derived from answers. We evaluate our method on the CK12-QA dataset and demonstrate that it significantly improves the discrimination between informative and irrelevant documents, even when they are long, complex, and multimodal. JETRTQA outperforms the previous state of the art, achieving a 2.4\% gain in accuracy on the validation set and 11.1\% on the test set.

Asma Abdulsalam, Areej Alhothali, Saleh Al-Ghamdi

Social media platforms have revolutionized traditional communication techniques by enabling people globally to connect instantaneously, openly, and frequently. People use social media to share personal stories and express their opinion. Negative emotions such as thoughts of death, self-harm, and hardship are commonly expressed on social media, particularly among younger generations. As a result, using social media to detect suicidal thoughts will help provide proper intervention that will ultimately deter others from self-harm and committing suicide and stop the spread of suicidal ideation on social media. To investigate the ability to detect suicidal thoughts in Arabic tweets automatically, we developed a novel Arabic suicidal tweets dataset, examined several machine learning models, including Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, and XGBoost, trained on word frequency and word embedding features, and investigated the ability of pre-trained deep learning models, AraBert, AraELECTRA, and AraGPT2, to identify suicidal thoughts in Arabic tweets. The results indicate that SVM and RF models trained on character n-gram features provided the best performance in the machine learning models, with 86% accuracy and an F1 score of 79%. The results of the deep learning models show that AraBert model outperforms other machine and deep learning models, achieving an accuracy of 91\% and an F1-score of 88%, which significantly improves the detection of suicidal ideation in the Arabic tweets dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to develop an Arabic suicidality detection dataset from Twitter and to use deep-learning approaches in detecting suicidality in Arabic posts.

Salwa Abbara, Mona Hafez, Aya Kazzaz et al.

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) aims to predict judgment outcomes based on case description. Several researchers have developed techniques to assist potential clients by predicting the outcome in the legal profession. However, none of the proposed techniques were implemented in Arabic, and only a few attempts were implemented in English, Chinese, and Hindi. In this paper, we develop a system that utilizes deep learning (DL) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to predict the judgment outcome from Arabic case scripts, especially in cases of custody and annulment of marriage. This system will assist judges and attorneys in improving their work and time efficiency while reducing sentencing disparity. In addition, it will help litigants, lawyers, and law students analyze the probable outcomes of any given case before trial. We use a different machine and deep learning models such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic regression (LR), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) using representation techniques such as TF-IDF and word2vec on the developed dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the five baseline methods, the SVM model with word2vec and LR with TF-IDF achieve the highest accuracy of 88% and 78% in predicting the judgment on custody cases and annulment of marriage, respectively. Furthermore, the LR and SVM with word2vec and BiLSTM model with TF-IDF achieved the highest accuracy of 88% and 69% in predicting the probability of outcomes on custody cases and annulment of marriage, respectively.

Asma Abdulsalam, Areej Alhothali

Social media platforms have transformed traditional communication methods by allowing users worldwide to communicate instantly, openly, and frequently. People use social media to express their opinion and share their personal stories and struggles. Negative feelings that express hardship, thoughts of death, and self-harm are widespread in social media, especially among young generations. Therefore, using social media to detect and identify suicidal ideation will help provide proper intervention that will eventually dissuade others from self-harming and committing suicide and prevent the spread of suicidal ideations on social media. Many studies have been carried out to identify suicidal ideation and behaviors in social media. This paper presents a comprehensive summary of current research efforts to detect suicidal ideation using machine learning algorithms on social media. This review 24 studies investigating the feasibility of social media usage for suicidal ideation detection is intended to facilitate further research in the field and will be a beneficial resource for researchers engaged in suicidal text classification.

Kholoud Alsubhi, Amani Jamal, Areej Alhothali

Question answering(QA) is one of the most challenging yet widely investigated problems in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Question-answering (QA) systems try to produce answers for given questions. These answers can be generated from unstructured or structured text. Hence, QA is considered an important research area that can be used in evaluating text understanding systems. A large volume of QA studies was devoted to the English language, investigating the most advanced techniques and achieving state-of-the-art results. However, research efforts in the Arabic question-answering progress at a considerably slower pace due to the scarcity of research efforts in Arabic QA and the lack of large benchmark datasets. Recently many pre-trained language models provided high performance in many Arabic NLP problems. In this work, we evaluate the state-of-the-art pre-trained transformers models for Arabic QA using four reading comprehension datasets which are Arabic-SQuAD, ARCD, AQAD, and TyDiQA-GoldP datasets. We fine-tuned and compared the performance of the AraBERTv2-base model, AraBERTv0.2-large model, and AraELECTRA model. In the last, we provide an analysis to understand and interpret the low-performance results obtained by some models.

Hind Saleh, Areej Alhothali, Kawthar Moria

The enormous amount of data being generated on the web and social media has increased the demand for detecting online hate speech. Detecting hate speech will reduce their negative impact and influence on others. A lot of effort in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain aimed to detect hate speech in general or detect specific hate speech such as religion, race, gender, or sexual orientation. Hate communities tend to use abbreviations, intentional spelling mistakes, and coded words in their communication to evade detection, adding more challenges to hate speech detection tasks. Thus, word representation will play an increasingly pivotal role in detecting hate speech. This paper investigates the feasibility of leveraging domain-specific word embedding in Bidirectional LSTM based deep model to automatically detect/classify hate speech. Furthermore, we investigate the use of the transfer learning language model (BERT) on hate speech problem as a binary classification task. The experiments showed that domainspecific word embedding with the Bidirectional LSTM based deep model achieved a 93% f1-score while BERT achieved up to 96% f1-score on a combined balanced dataset from available hate speech datasets.

Areej Alhothali, Jesse Hoey

In this paper, we propose an extension to graph-based sentiment lexicon induction methods by incorporating distributed and semantic word representations in building the similarity graph to expand a three-dimensional sentiment lexicon. We also implemented and evaluated the label propagation using four different word representations and similarity metrics. Our comprehensive evaluation of the four approaches was performed on a single data set, demonstrating that all four methods can generate a significant number of new sentiment assignments with high accuracy. The highest correlations (tau=0.51) and the lowest error (mean absolute error < 1.1%), obtained by combining both the semantic and the distributional features, outperformed the distributional-based and semantic-based label-propagation models and approached a supervised algorithm.

Jesse Hoey, Tobias Schroeder, Areej Alhothali

This paper describes a novel method for building affectively intelligent human-interactive agents. The method is based on a key sociological insight that has been developed and extensively verified over the last twenty years, but has yet to make an impact in artificial intelligence. The insight is that resource bounded humans will, by default, act to maintain affective consistency. Humans have culturally shared fundamental affective sentiments about identities, behaviours, and objects, and they act so that the transient affective sentiments created during interactions confirm the fundamental sentiments. Humans seek and create situations that confirm or are consistent with, and avoid and supress situations that disconfirm or are inconsistent with, their culturally shared affective sentiments. This "affect control principle" has been shown to be a powerful predictor of human behaviour. In this paper, we present a probabilistic and decision-theoretic generalisation of this principle, and we demonstrate how it can be leveraged to build affectively intelligent artificial agents. The new model, called BayesAct, can maintain multiple hypotheses about sentiments simultaneously as a probability distribution, and can make use of an explicit utility function to make value-directed action choices. This allows the model to generate affectively intelligent interactions with people by learning about their identity, predicting their behaviours using the affect control principle, and taking actions that are simultaneously goal-directed and affect-sensitive. We demonstrate this generalisation with a set of simulations. We then show how our model can be used as an emotional "plug-in" for artificially intelligent systems that interact with humans in two different settings: an exam practice assistant (tutor) and an assistive device for persons with a cognitive disability.