Natural language processing (NLP) refers to the field of study that focuses on the interactions between human language and computers. It has recently gained much attention for analyzing human language computationally and has spread its applications for various tasks such as machine translation, information extraction, summarization, question answering, and others. With the rapid growth of cloud computing services, merging NLP in the cloud is a significant benefit. It allows researchers to conduct NLP-related experiments on large amounts of data handled by big data techniques while harnessing the cloud’s vast, on-demand computing power. However, it has not sufficiently spread its tools and applications as a service in the cloud and there is little literature available that discusses the scope of interdisciplinary work. NLP, cloud Computing, and big data are vast domains and contain their challenges and potentials. By overcoming those challenges and integrating these fields, great potential for NLP and its applications can be unleashed. This paper presents a survey of NLP in cloud computing with a key focus on the comparison of cloud-based NLP services, challenges of NLP and big data while emphasizing the necessity of viable cloud-based NLP services. In the first part of this paper, an overview of NLP is presented by discussing different levels of NLP and components of natural language generation (NLG), followed by the applications of NLP. In the second part, the concept of cloud computing is discussed that highlights the architectural layers and deployment models of cloud computing and cloud-hosted NLP services. In the third part, the field of big data in the cloud is discussed with an emphasis on NLP. Furthermore, information extraction via NLP techniques within big data is introduced.

Online social networking platforms allow people to freely express their ideas, opinions, and emotions negatively or positively. Previous studies have examined sentiments on these platforms to study their behavior in different contexts and purposes. The mechanism of collecting public opinion information has attracted researchers to automatically classify the polarity of public opinions based on the use of concise language in messages, such as tweets, by analyzing social media data. In this paper, we extend the preceding work where an unsupervised approach to automatically detect extreme opinions/posts in social networks is proposed. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on five different social network and media datasets. In this work, we use a semi-supervised approach known as BERT to reevaluate the accuracy of our prior approach and the obtained classified dataset. The experiment proves that in these datasets, posts that were previously classified as negative or positive extreme are extremely negative or positive in many cases while using BERT. Furthermore, BERT shows the capability to classify the extreme sentiments when fine-tuned with an appropriate extreme sentiments dataset.

The usability of the events information on social media has been widely studied recently. Several surveys have reviewed the specific type of events on social media using various techniques. Most of the existing methods for event detection are segregated as they approach certain situations that limit the overall details of events happening consecutively on social media while ignoring the crucial relationship between the evolution of these events. Numerous events that materialize on the social media sphere every day before our eyes jeopardize people’s safety and are referred to by using a high-level concept of dangerous events. The front of dangerous events is broad, yet no known work exists that fully addresses and approaches this issue. This work introduces the term dangerous events and defines its scope in terms of practicality to establish the origins of the events caused by the previous events and their respective relationship. Furthermore, it divides dangerous events into sentiment, scenario, and action-based dangerous events grouped on their similarities. The existing research and methods related to event detection are surveyed, including some available events datasets and knowledge-base to address the problem. Finally, the survey is concluded with suggestions for future work and possible related challenges.

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