Bayan Abu Shawar

• Professor (Associate) at Al Ain University

Polyadic chatbots, conversational agents created explicitly for multiparty interactions, are gaining appeal as game-changing technologies in human-AI engagement. Unlike dyadic chatbots, which are designed for one-on-one conversations, there is a lack of studies examining the recent research on polyadic chatbots. This research investigates the roles...

The internet of things (IoT) has transformed the way appliances and devices are connected and especially in the case of smart homes, in which smart devices can communicate through networks to improve everyday activities. However, it might be difficult to provide a high level of security for the data produced by these devices. Current security mecha...

Technological advancements have facilitated the ability of numerous individuals adhering to the Islamic faith to engage in the recitation of the Qur’an through the utilization of computers and handheld gadgets. This paper presents an Automatic Qur’an Reciter, a mobile application designed to facilitate the reading, recitation, and listening of many...

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on many facets of human behavior. Most significantly, it required significant changes to how daily activities were conducted. The majority of individuals were forced to work and communicate from home due to social distancing, which opened the door for more virtual meetings. Since most organizations sta...

To promote the research and development of dialogue breakdown detection for dialogue systems, we have been organizing a series of dialogue breakdown detection challenges to detect a system’s inappropriate utterances that lead to dialogue breakdowns in chat-oriented dialogue. In this paper, we overview Dialogue Breakdown Detection Challenge 4 (DBDC4...

Decision trees learning is one of the most practical classification methods in machine learning, which is used for approximating discrete-valued target functions. However, they may overfit the training data, which limits their ability to generalize to unseen instances. In this study, we investigated the use of instance reduction techniques to smoot...

Text classification has many applications in text processing and information retrieval. Instance-based learning (IBL) is among the top-performing text classification methods. However, its effectiveness depends on the distance function it uses to determine similar documents. In this study, we evaluate some popular distance measures' performance and...

Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems is used as a media to teach a language without the need for a classroom or a teacher. CALL systems include language lessons and exercises to enhance the learners’ vocabulary, grammar, and writing skills, and to provide learners with immediate feedback on their achievements. However, there is still...

The rapid growth in technology and communication has a massive effect in all domains, including the education sector. The teaching paradigms were evolved from traditional face-to-face and distance learning to e-learning, open learning and recently m-learning. This paper spots the light on e-learning and m-learning, on specific, the common and diffe...

This report presents and describes the shared task on “Data Collection and Annotation” conducted in WOCHAT, the Second Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agent Technologies. We present a quick review of the proposed series of shared tasks and summarize the results of this second edition in terms of chatbot platforms made available for it and t...

Web accessibility concerns of building websites that are accessible by all people regardless of their ability or disability. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has been established to raise awareness of universal access. WAI develops guidelines which can help to ensure that Web pages are widely accessible. Assistive technology is used to in...

Instance-Based learners such as the kNN algorithm classify a new instance based on the k most similar instances. Usually these instances have equal weights or votes. Some systems assign them weights that are inversely proportional to their distance from the new instance. In this work, we present several Bayesian-based instance weighting technique t...

In this paper, we describe a way to access Arabic Web Question Answering (QA) corpus using a chatbot, without the need for sophisticated natural language processing or logical inference. Any Natural Language (NL) interface to Question Answer (QA) system is constrained to reply with the given answers, so there is no need for NL generation to recreat...

This paper exposes an approach to investigate accessible contents of educational websites to insure and measure its compliance with accessibility standards for visually impaired people. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has been established to raise awareness of universal access. WAI develops guidelines which can help to ensure that Web pa...

A chatbot is a program which can chat in natural language, on a topic built into the chatbot's internal knowledge model. Many chatbots exist, with different knowledge-bases programmed by the chatbot builders. We have built a system to convert a website text (corpus) to a chatbot knowledge-base format. In this paper the chatbot is used as a question...

The new adventure of online world has helped to improve many domains and sectors. Knowledge management era which originally related to business sector is now required in industry, health, or any institute that needs to manage its knowledge. Education is no exception! The advancement in computers speed and memory, and the growth of Internet usage ar...

This paper focuses on the Learning Management System (LMS) from the point of present it as Knowledge Management (KM) base. There is huge information that can be extracted from any LMS that can be useful for many investigators. This information is not necessary to be only concentrating on the content of the LMS but it will cover also all parameters...

In this paper we present the integration of our e-learning management system with other computerized systems used in the University of Jordan (JU). JU uses blackboard as a Learning Management System (LMS), this paper discusses the enhancements of this platform to facilitate more student, author, and administrator control. Furthermore, a description...

This paper presents the experience of Arab Open University; AOU for short; on using WAP technology in mobile learning; m-Learning. The goal is to enhance e-Learning aspects of the existing learning management sys-tems (LMS); e.g. Moodle. In addition to presenting technical aspects of the WAP, we also introduce the advantages and disadvantages of us...

This paper, presents a theoretical study of e- Llearning authoring tools to produce online courses specialized in mathematical issues. We will introduce specialized module for an AOU math course called MST121. This module will overcome the shortages of the current module in terms of using simulation and provide different modes of presentation as vi...

The great evolution of the online world effects many domains, mainly education and knowledge management era. The new trend in educational institutes moves towards online learning, e-learning instead of traditional approach of face-to-face teaching. The main aspect of knowledge management is to offer various kind of information in different formats...

In this paper, we describe a way to access Arabic information using chatbot, without the need for sophisticated natural language processing or logical inference. FAQs are Frequently-Asked Questions documents, designed to capture the logical ontology of a given domain. Any Natural Language interface to an FAQ is constrained to reply with the given A...

This paper describes experimental use of the multi-agent architecture to integrate Natural Language and Information Systems research and teaching, by casting a group of students as intelligent agents to collect and analyse English language resources from around the world. Section 2 and section 3 describe the hybrid intelligent information systems e...

From an educational perspective, today's world of information technology has two of the most growing fields, knowledge management (KM) and e-learning. In this paper, the need for developing an online library system as tool to manage knowledge and as a necessary tool in e- learning paradigms is presented through implementing an online library system...

We present in this paper our experience of utilizing the virtual learning environment system with other computerized systems. Arab Open University is one of the first organizations that adopt an e-learning methodology in the Arabic region. We present Moodle as a virtual learning environment (VLM) used at AOU. The integration process of VLE with oth...

Chatbots are computer programs that interact with users using natural lan- guages. This technology started in the 1960’s; the aim was to see if chatbot systems could fool users that they were real humans. However, chatbot sys- tems are not only built to mimic human conversation, and entertain users. In this paper, we investigate other applications...

This paper follows the progress of improving the Arab Open University's Learning Management System by integrating it with other online systems; one of the top line topics is to utilize the benefits of mobile technology. We introduce the infrastructure of integrating our learning management system with such technologies. A complete description of th...

CALL can be a route to learner autonomy, allowing students to use PC-based software to learn individually, without need of class or teacher. However, language is above all a medium for communication, implying a dialogue of two or more participants: although CALL can provide exercises and lessons in grammar

A chatbot is a software system, which can interact or "chat" with a human user in natural language such as English. For the annual Loebner Prize contest, rival chatbots have been assessed in terms of ability to fool a judge in a restricted chat session. We are investigating methods to train and adapt a chatbot to a specific user's language use or a...

Theoretical and applied linguistics researchers are not the only groups who benefit from corpora, language learners and teachers can also. We have surveyed attempts at using corpora as an aid to teaching English, Spanish, and German. However, for Arabic the number of corpus-based language teaching studies is very limited: the University of Kuwait h...

This paper presents a complete description of the improvements that have been conducted for the learning management system at Arab Open University. AOU is the first regional university for open learning in the Middle East and North Africa. The university has strict regulations on the learning process to assure the quality of delivering all learning...

This paper follows the progress of improving the Arab Open University's Learning Management System by integrating it with other online systems, such as the university's Student Information System and the Human Resource System. A complete description of the open source learning management system, Moodle, and the benefits of adapting open source plat...

A chatbot is a machine conversation system which interacts with human users via natural conversational language. Software to machine-learn conversational patterns from a transcribed dialogue corpus has been used to generate a range of chatbots speaking various languages and sublanguages including varieties of English, as well as French, Arabic and...

A chatbot is a conversational agent that interacts with users through natural languages. In this paper, we describe a new way to access information using a chatbot. The FAQ in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds has been used to retrain the ALICE chatbot system, producing FAQchat. The results returned from FAQchat are similar to ones...

International research in NLP is dominated by work on English. NLP techniques and systems can be ported to other natural languages, but this is generally a labour-intensive task, requiring scarce computational and linguistic expertise; hence minority languages are poorly represented in NLP technology. We present an automated approach to porting an...

In this paper, we describe a new way to access information by “chatting” to an information source. This involves a chatbot, a program that emulates human conversation; the chatbot must be trainable with a text, to accept input and match it against the text to generate replies in the conversation. We have developed a Machine Learning approach to ret...

The classical way of viewing data set is using the visualization process, which maps the data from numerical or textual form to a visual representation that our mind can easily interpret such as: using graphical diagrams, charts, and geometric representation. In this paper we introduce a new idea to visualize a dialogue corpus using a chatbot inter...

Résumé – Abstract Dans ce papier nous présentons une vue d'ensemble critique d'outils disponibles pour l'analyse de corpus arabes, en nous concentrant sur la concordance (Monoconc : Barlow 2003), l'analyse morphologique et le marquage des catégories grammaticales (Shaalan 1989, Ahmed 2000, Khoja 2001, Freeman 2001, Beesley 2001, Berri Zidoum et Ati...

This study examines two chatter bots systems called ALICE and Elizabeth, which are adapted from ELIZA program. Joseph Weizenbaum implemented ELIZA in 1966 and it was originally designed to emulate a psychotherapist. This report also provides an introduction to the analysis of ALICE and Elizabeth focusing in the knowledge representation and pattern...

This paper presents two chatbot systems, ALICE and Elizabeth, illustrating the dialogue knowledge representation and pattern matching techniques of each. We discuss the problems which arise when using the Corpus of Spoken Afrikaans (Korpus Gesproke Afrikaans) to retrain the ALICE chatbot system with human dialogue examples. A Java program to conver...

This paper describes the results from this experiment, information obtained from the MT user survey and our detailed rationale for corpus design in response to these findings. Our intention is to make the corpus publicly available, along with the results from our detailed human MT evaluations using these texts, to serve the needs of the MT communit...

This paper presents two chatbot systems, ALICE and Elizabeth, illustrating the dialogue knowledge representation and pattern matching techniques of each. We discuss the problems which arise when using the Dialogue Diversity Corpus to retrain a chatbot system with human dialogue examples. A Java program to convert from dialog transcript to AIML form...

This study examines two chatter bots systems called ALICE and Elizabeth, which are adapted from ELIZA program. Joseph Weizenbaum implemented ELIZA in 1966 and it was originally designed to emulate a psychotherapist. This report also provides an introduction to the analysis of ALICE and Elizabeth focusing in the knowledge representation and pattern...

In this paper we describe a way to access information using chatbot, without the need for sophisticated natural language processing or logical inference. FAQs are Frequently-Asked Questions documents, designed to capture the logical ontology of a given domain. Any Natural Language interface to an FAQ is constrained to reply with the given Answers,...

Arab Open University is one of the first organizations that adopt an e-learning methodology in the Arabic region. AOU has partnerships with the United Kingdom Open University (UKOU) and other national educational institutes. In this paper, our experience of using two e-learning platforms FirstClass, and Moodle is clarified. Further more, we discuss...