The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has influenced the everyday life of people around the globe. In general and during lockdown phases, people worldwide use social media network to state their viewpoints and general feelings concerning the pandemic that has hampered their daily lives. Twitter is one of the most commonly used social media platforms, and it showed a massive increase in tweets related to coronavirus, including positive, negative, and neutral tweets, in a minimal period. The researchers move toward the sentiment analysis and analyze the various emotions of the public toward COVID-19 due to the diverse nature of tweets. Meanwhile, people have expressed their feelings regarding the vaccinations' safety and effectiveness on social networking sites such as Twitter. As an advanced step, in this paper, our proposed approach analyzes COVID-19 by focusing on Twitter users who share their opinions on this social media networking site. The proposed approach analyzes collected tweets' sentiments for sentiment classification using various feature sets and classifiers. The early detection of COVID-19 sentiments from collected tweets allow for a better understanding and handling of the pandemic. Tweets are categorized into positive, negative, and neutral sentiment classes. We evaluate the performance of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) classifiers using evaluation metrics (i.e., accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score). Experiments prove that the proposed approach provides better accuracy of 96.66, 95.22, 94.33, and 93.88% for COVISenti, COVIDSenti_A, COVIDSenti_B, and COVIDSenti_C, respectively, compared to all other methods used in this study as well as compared to the existing approaches and traditional ML and DL algorithms.

With time, textual data is proliferating, primarily through the publications of articles. With this rapid increase in textual data, anonymous content is also increasing. Researchers are searching for alternative strategies to identify the author of an unknown text. There is a need to develop a system to identify the actual author of unknown texts based on a given set of writing samples. This study presents a novel approach based on ensemble learning, DistilBERT, and conventional machine learning techniques for authorship identification. The proposed approach extracts the valuable characteristics of the author using a count vectorizer and bi-gram Term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). An extensive and detailed dataset, “All the news” is used in this study for experimentation. The dataset is divided into three subsets (article1, article2, and article3). We limit the scope of the dataset and selected ten authors in the first scope and 20 authors in the second scope for experimentation. The experimental results of proposed ensemble learning and DistilBERT provide better performance for all the three subsets of the “All the news” dataset. In the first scope, the experimental results prove that the proposed ensemble learning approach from 10 authors provides a better accuracy gain of 3.14% and from DistilBERT 2.44% from the article1 dataset. Similarly, in the second scope from 20 authors, the proposed ensemble learning approach provides a better accuracy gain of 5.25% and from DistilBERT 7.17% from the article1 dataset, which is better than previous state-of-the-art studies.

Sign language plays a pivotal role in the lives of impaired people having speaking and hearing disabilities. They can convey messages using hand gesture movements. American Sign Language (ASL) recognition is challenging due to the increasing intra-class similarity and high complexity. This paper used a deep convolutional neural network for ASL alphabet recognition to overcome ASL recognition challenges. This paper presents an ASL recognition approach using a deep convolutional neural network. The performance of the DeepCNN model improves with the amount of given data; for this purpose, we applied the data augmentation technique to expand the size of training data from existing data artificially. According to the experiments, the proposed DeepCNN model provides consistent results for the ASL dataset. Experiments prove that the DeepCNN gives a better accuracy gain of 19.84%, 8.37%, 16.31%, 17.17%, 5.86%, and 3.26% as compared to various state-of-the-art approaches.

The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams, synthesizes event-specific information, e.g., a terrorist attack, and alerts law enforcement, emergency services, and media outlets. Specifically, the proposed framework, Tweet-to-Act (T2A), employs word embedding to transform tweets into a vector space model and then utilizes the Word Mover's Distance (WMD) to cluster tweets for the identification of incidents. To extract reliable and valuable information from a large dataset of short and informal tweets, the proposed framework employs sequence labeling with bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory based Recurrent Neural Networks (bLSTM-RNN). Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed framework, T2A, outperforms other state-of-the-art methods that use vector space modeling and distance calculation techniques, e.g., Euclidean and Cosine distance. T2A achieves an accuracy of 96% and an F1-score of 86.2% on real-life datasets.

With time, numerous online communication platforms have emerged that allow people to express themselves, increasing the dissemination of toxic languages, such as racism, sexual harassment, and other negative behaviors that are not accepted in polite society. As a result, toxic language identification in online communication has emerged as a critical application of natural language processing. Numerous academic and industrial researchers have recently researched toxic language identification using machine learning algorithms. However, Nontoxic comments, including particular identification descriptors, such as Muslim, Jewish, White, and Black, were assigned unrealistically high toxicity ratings in several machine learning models. This research analyzes and compares modern deep learning algorithms for multilabel toxic comments classification. We explore two scenarios: the first is a multilabel classification of Religious toxic comments, and the second is a multilabel classification of race or toxic ethnicity comments with various word embeddings (GloVe, Word2vec, and FastText) without word embeddings using an ordinary embedding layer. Experiments show that the CNN model produced the best results for classifying multilabel toxic comments in both scenarios. We compared the outcomes of these modern deep learning model performances in terms of multilabel evaluation metrics.