RESUMO
The use of offensive terms in user-generated content on different social media platforms is one of the major concerns for these platforms. The offensive terms have a negative impact on individuals, which may lead towards the degradation of societal and civilized manners. The immense amount of content generated at a higher speed makes it humanly impossible to categorise and detect offensive terms. Besides, it is an open challenge for natural language processing (NLP) to detect such terminologies automatically. Substantial efforts are made for high-resource languages such as English. However, it becomes more challenging when dealing with resource-poor languages such as Urdu. Because of the lack of standard datasets and pre-processing tools for automatic offensive terms detection. This paper introduces a combinatorial pre-processing approach in developing a classification model for cross-platform (Twitter and YouTube) use. The approach uses datasets from two different platforms (Twitter and YouTube) the training and testing the model, which is trained to apply decision tree, random forest and naive Bayes algorithms. The proposed combinatorial pre-processing approach is applied to check how machine learning models behave with different combinations of standard pre-processing techniques for low-resource language in the cross-platform setting. The experimental results represent the effectiveness of the machine learning model over different subsets of traditional pre-processing approaches in building a classification model for automatic offensive terms detection for a low resource language, i.e., Urdu, in the cross-platform scenario. In the experiments, when dataset D1 is used for training and D2 is applied for testing, the pre-processing approach named Stopword removal produced better results with an accuracy of 83.27%. Whilst, in this case, when dataset D2 is used for training and D1 is applied for testing, stopword removal and punctuation removal were observed as a better preprocessing approach with an accuracy of 74.54%. The combinatorial approach proposed in this paper outperformed the benchmark for the considered datasets using classical as well as ensemble machine learning with an accuracy of 82.9% and 97.2% for dataset D1 and D2, respectively.
RESUMO
Higher educational institutes generate massive amounts of student data. This data needs to be explored in depth to better understand various facets of student learning behavior. The educational data mining approach has given provisions to extract useful and non-trivial knowledge from large collections of student data. Using the educational data mining method of classification, this research analyzes data of 291 university students in an attempt to predict student performance at the end of a 4-year degree program. A student segmentation framework has also been proposed to identify students at various levels of academic performance. Coupled with the prediction model, the proposed segmentation framework provides a useful mechanism for devising pedagogical policies to increase the quality of education by mitigating academic failure and encouraging higher performance. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the applicability of classifying students into multiple performance levels using a small subset of courses being taught in the initial two years of the 4-year degree program.
