In digital communication, emoji are essential in decoding nuances such as irony, sarcasm, and humour. However, their incorporation in Arabic natural language processing (NLP) has been cautious because of the perceived complexities of the Arabic language. This paper introduces ArSarcasMoji, a dataset of 24,630 emoji-augmented texts, with 17. 5% that shows irony. Through our analysis, we highlight specific emoji patterns paired with sentiment roles that denote irony in Arabic texts. The research counters prevailing notions, emphasising the importance of emoji’s role in understanding Arabic textual irony, and addresses their potential for accurate irony detection in Arabic digital content.

Utilisation of multilingual language models such as mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa has increasingly gained attention in recent work by exploiting the multilingualism of such models in different downstream tasks across different languages. However, performance degradation is expected in transfer learning across languages compared to monolingual performance although it is an acceptable trade-off considering the sparsity of resources and lack of available training data in low-resource languages. In this work, we study the effect of machine translation on the cross-lingual transfer learning in a crisis event classification task. Our experiments include measuring the effect of machine-translating the target data into the source language and vice versa. We evaluated and compared the performance in terms of accuracy and F1-Score. The results show that translating the source data into the target language improves the prediction accuracy by 14.8% and the Weighted Average F1-Score by 19.2% when compared to zero-shot transfer to an unseen language.

Metaphors use words from one domain of knowledge to describe another, which can make the meaning less clear and require human interpretation to understand. This makes it difficult for automated models to detect metaphorical usage. The objective of the experiments in the paper is to enhance the ability of deep learning models to detect metaphors automatically. This is achieved by using two elements of semantic richness, sensory experience, and body-object interaction, as the main lexical features, combined with the contextual information present in the metaphorical sentences. The tests were conducted using classification and sequence labeling models for metaphor detection on the three metaphorical corpora VUAMC, MOH-X, and TroFi. The sensory experience led to significant improvements in the classification and sequence labelling models across all datasets. The highest gains were seen on the VUAMC dataset: recall increased by 20.9%, F1 by 7.5% for the classification model, and Recall increased by 11.66% and F1 by 3.69% for the sequence labelling model. Body-object interaction also showed positive impact on the three datasets.

Emoji can be valuable features in textual sentiment analysis. One of the key elements of the use of emoji in sentiment analysis is the emoji sentiment lexicon. However, constructing such a lexicon is a challenging task. This is because interpreting the sentiment conveyed by these pictographic symbols is highly subjective, and differs depending upon how each person perceives them. Cultural background is considered to be one of the main factors that affects emoji sentiment interpretation. Thus, we focus in this work on targeting people from Arab cultures. This is done by constructing a context-free Arabic emoji sentiment lexicon annotated by native Arabic speakers from seven different regions (Gulf, Egypt, Levant, Sudan, North Africa, Iraq, and Yemen) to see how these Arabic users label the sentiment of these symbols without a textual context. We recruited 53 annotators (males and females) to annotate 1,069 unique emoji. Then we evaluated the reliability of the annotation for each participant by applying sensitivity (Recall) and consistency (Krippendorff’s Alpha) tests. For the analysis, we investigated the resulting emoji sentiment annotations to explore the impact of the Arabic cultural context. We analyzed this cultural reflection from different perspectives, including national affiliation, use of colour indications, animal indications, weather indications and religious impact.

Emoji (digital pictograms) are crucial features for textual sentiment analysis. However, analysing the sentiment roles of emoji is very complex. This is due to its dependency on different factors, such as textual context, cultural perspective, interlocutor’s personal traits, interlocutors’ relationships or a platforms’ functional features. This work introduces an approach to analysing the sentiment effects of emoji as textual features. Using an Arabic dataset as a benchmark, our results confirm the borrowed argument that each emoji has three different norms of sentiment role (negative, neutral or positive). Therefore, an emoji can play different sentiment roles depending upon the context. It can behave as an emphasizer, an indicator, a mitigator, a reverser or a trigger of either negative or positive sentiment within a text. In addition, an emoji may have a neutral effect (i.e., no effect) on the sentiment of the text.

Unsupervised extractive document summarization aims to extract salient sentences from a document without requiring a labelled corpus. In existing graph-based methods, vertex and edge weights are usually created by calculating sentence similarities. In this paper, we develop a Graph-Based Unsupervised Summarization(GUSUM) method for extractive text summarization based on the principle of including the most important sentences while excluding sentences with similar meanings in the summary. We modify traditional graph ranking algorithms with recent sentence embedding models and sentence features and modify how sentence centrality is computed. We first define the sentence feature scores represented at the vertices, indicating the importance of each sentence in the document. After this stage, we use Sentence-BERT for obtaining sentence embeddings to better capture the sentence meaning. In this way, we define the edges of a graph where semantic similarities are represented. Next we create an undirected graph that includes sentence significance and similarities between sentences. In the last stage, we determine the most important sentences in the document with the ranking method we suggested on the graph created. Experiments on CNN/Daily Mail, New York Times, arXiv, and PubMed datasets show our approach achieves high performance on unsupervised graph-based summarization when evaluated both automatically and by humans.

Emoji (the popular digital pictograms) are sometimes seen as a new kind of artificial and universally usable and consistent writing code. In spite of their assumed universality, there is some evidence that the sense of an emoji, specifically in regard to sentiment, may change from language to language and culture to culture. This paper investigates whether contextual emoji sentiment analysis is consistent across Arabic and European languages. To conduct this investigation, we, first, created the Arabic emoji sentiment lexicon (Arab-ESL). Then, we exploited an existing European emoji sentiment lexicon to compare the sentiment conveyed in each of the two families of language and culture (Arabic and European). The results show that the pairwise correlation between the two lexicons is consistent for emoji that represent, for instance, hearts, facial expressions, and body language. However, for a subset of emoji (those that represent objects, nature, symbols, and some human activities), there are large differences in the sentiment conveyed. More interestingly, an extremely high level of inconsistency has been shown with food emoji.

In this paper we implement and compare 7 different data augmentation strategies for the task of automatic scoring of children’s ability to understand others’ thoughts, feelings, and desires (or “mindreading”). We recruit in-domain experts to re-annotate augmented samples and determine to what extent each strategy preserves the original rating. We also carry out multiple experiments to measure how much each augmentation strategy improves the performance of automatic scoring systems. To determine the capabilities of automatic systems to generalize to unseen data, we create UK-MIND-20 - a new corpus of children’s performance on tests of mindreading, consisting of 10,320 question-answer pairs. We obtain a new state-of-the-art performance on the MIND-CA corpus, improving macro-F1-score by 6 points. Results indicate that both the number of training examples and the quality of the augmentation strategies affect the performance of the systems. The task-specific augmentations generally outperform task-agnostic augmentations. Automatic augmentations based on vectors (GloVe, FastText) perform the worst. We find that systems trained on MIND-CA generalize well to UK-MIND-20. We demonstrate that data augmentation strategies also improve the performance on unseen data.

In this paper we present the first work on the automated scoring of mindreading ability in middle childhood and early adolescence. We create MIND-CA, a new corpus of 11,311 question-answer pairs in English from 1,066 children aged from 7 to 14. We perform machine learning experiments and carry out extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation. We obtain promising results, demonstrating the applicability of state-of-the-art NLP solutions to a new domain and task.