Hate speech and abusive language have become a common phenomenon on Arabic social media. Automatic hate speech and abusive detection systems can facilitate the prohibition of toxic textual contents. The complexity, informality and ambiguity of the Arabic dialects hindered the provision of the needed resources for Arabic abusive/hate speech detection research. In this paper, we introduce the first publicly-available Levantine Hate Speech and Abusive (L-HSAB) Twitter dataset with the objective to be a benchmark dataset for automatic detection of online Levantine toxic contents. We, further, provide a detailed review of the data collection steps and how we design the annotation guidelines such that a reliable dataset annotation is guaranteed. This has been later emphasized through the comprehensive evaluation of the annotations as the annotation agreement metrics of Cohen's Kappa (k) and Krippendorff's alpha (α) indicated the consistency of the annotations.

For brands, gaining new customer is more expensive than keeping an existing one. Therefore, the ability to keep customers in a brand is becoming more challenging these days. Churn happens when a customer leaves a brand to another competitor. Most of the previous work considers the problem of churn prediction using CDRs. In this paper, we use micro-posts to classify customers into churny or nonchurny. We explore the power of CNNs since they achieved state-of-the-art in various computer vision and NLP applications. However, the robustness of end-toend models has some limitations such as the availability of a large amount of labeled data and uninterpretability of these models. We investigate the use of CNNs augmented with structured logic rules to overcome or reduce this issue. We developed our system called Churn teacher by using an iterative distillation method that transfers the knowledge, extracted using just the combination of three logic rules, directly into the weight of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Furthermore, we used weight normalization to speed up training our convolutional neural networks. Experimental results showed that with just these three rules, we were able to get state-of-the-art on publicly available Twitter dataset about three Telecom brands.

In this paper, we describe our contribution in SemEval-2018 contest. We tackled task 1 "Affect in Tweets", subtask E-c "Detecting Emotions (multi-label classification)". A multilabel classification system Tw-StAR was developed to recognize the emotions embedded in Arabic, English and Spanish tweets. To handle the multi-label classification problem via traditional classifiers, we employed the binary relevance transformation strategy while a TF-IDF scheme was used to generate the tweets' features. We investigated using single and combinations of several preprocessing tasks to further improve the performance. The results showed that specific combinations of preprocessing tasks could significantly improve the evaluation measures. This has been later emphasized by the official results as our system ranked 3 rd for both Arabic and Spanish datasets and 14 th for the English dataset.

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In this paper, we present our contribution in SemEval 2017 international workshop. We have tackled task 4 entitled "Sentiment analysis in Twitter", specifically subtask 4A-Arabic. We propose two Arabic sentiment classification models implemented using supervised and unsupervised learning strategies. In both models, Arabic tweets were preprocessed first then various schemes of bag-of-N-grams were extracted to be used as features. The final submission was selected upon the best performance achieved by the supervised learning-based model. Nevertheless, the results obtained by the unsupervised learning-based model are considered promising and evolvable if more rich lexica are adopted in further work.