With the proliferation of social media platforms that provide anonymity, easy access, online community development, and online debate, detecting and tracking hate speech has become a major concern for society, individuals, policymakers, and researchers. Combating hate speech and fake news are the most pressing societal issues. It is difficult to expose false claims before they cause significant harm. Automatic fact or claim verification has recently piqued the interest of various research communities. Despite efforts to use automatic approaches for detection and monitoring, their results are still unsatisfactory, and that requires more research work in the area. Fake news and hate speech messages are any messages on social media platforms that spread negativity in society about sex, caste, religion, politics, race, disability, sexual orientation, and so on. Thus, the type of massage is extremely difficult to detect and combat. This work aims to analyze the optimal approaches for this kind of problem, as well as the relationship between the approaches, dataset type, size, and accuracy. Finally, based on the analysis results of the implemented approaches, deep learning (DL) approaches have been recommended for other Ethiopian languages to increase the performance of all evaluation metrics from different social media platforms. Additionally, as the review results indicate, the combination of DL and machine learning (ML) approaches with a balanced dataset can improve the detection and combating performance of the system.

A web application is a software system that provides an interface to its users through a web browser on any operating system (OS). Despite their growing popularity, web application security threats have become more diverse, resulting in more severe damage. Malware attacks, particularly SQLI attacks, are common in poorly designed web applications. This vulnerability has been known for more than two decades and is still a source of concern. Accordingly, different techniques have been proposed to counter SQLI attacks. However, the majority of them either fail to cover the entire scope of the problem. The structured query language injection (SQLI) attack is among the most harmful online application attacks and often happens when the attacker(s) alter (modify), remove (delete), read, and copy data from database servers. All facets of security, including confidentiality, data integrity, and data availability, can be impacted by a successful SQLI attack. This paper investigates common SQLI attack forms, mechanisms, and a method of identifying, detecting, and preventing them based on the existence of the SQL query. Here, we have developed a comprehensive framework for detecting and preventing the effectiveness of techniques that address specific issues following the essence of the SQLI attacks by using traditional Navies Bayes (NB), Decision Trees (DT), Support Vectors Machine (SVM), Random Forests (RF), Logistic Regression (LR), and Neural Networks Based on Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and hybrid approach are used for our study. The machine learning (ML) algorithms were implemented using the Keras library, while the classical methods were implemented using the Tensor Flow-Learn package. For this proposed research work, we gathered 54,306 pieces of data from weblogs, cookies, session usage, and from HTTP (S) request files to train and test our model. The performance evaluation results for training set in metrics such as the hybrid approach (ANN and SVM) perform better accuracies in precision (99.05% and 99.54%), recall (99.65% and 99.61%), f1-score (99.35% and 99.57%), and training set (99.20% and 99.60%) respectively than other ML approaches. However, their training time is too high (i.e., 19.62 and 26.16 s respectively) for NB and RF. Accordingly, the NB technique performs poorly in accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, training set evaluation metrics, and best in training time. Additionally, the performance evaluation results for test set in metrics such as hybrid approach (ANN and SVM) perform better accuracies in precision (98.87% and 99.20%), recall (99.13% and 99.47%), f1-score (99.00% and 99.33%) and test set (98.70% and 99.40%) respectively than other ML approaches. However, their test time is too high (i.e., 11.76 and 15.33 ms respectively). Accordingly, the NB technique performs poorly in accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, test set evaluation metrics, and best in training time. Here, among the implemented ML techniques, SVM and ANN are weak learners. The achieved performance evaluation results indicated that the proposed SQLI attack detection and prevention mechanism has been improved over the previously implemented techniques in the theme. Finally, in this paper, we aimed to keep researchers up-to-date, with contributions, and recommendations to the understanding of the intersection between SQLI attacks and prevention in the artificial intelligence (AI) field.

Computer programming courses are among the important components of the curriculum to be studied, not only in the school of Computing and Informatics, but also in most of the field including Natural Sciences, Mathematics, and Engineering Science departments. In this research, a study was conducted to investigate and explore the views of students for the failure and difficulties they faced in learning fundamental programming courses. There are many factors that influence the high rate of failure of students in computer programming courses. This paper focuses on the teaching and learning methodologies and strategies that are implemented in teaching of programming courses. This is a major factor for consideration; hence an investigation into the causes of failure of students in computer programming courses from the learner perspective with regard to the teaching methodology used by teachers to teach these courses is relevant and very important concept. Computer programming courses form part of the core concentration areas for students especially studying in school of computing and informatics as an undergraduate degree program. Computer programming students are expected to prove capabilities in the principles of programming and logic that are being taught in the course; even though some of these concepts are highly intellectual and multifaceted. Their opinions to the usefulness of the teaching methods being implemented in computer programming courses were required for. The needs and concerns about the teaching and learning methods are highlighted in the survey and discussed thereby leading to the making of suggestions about the ways to improve the teaching and learning methods that are used in computer programming courses in order to advance understanding of computer programming, when studied by students thereby minimizing failure rates of those students.

Objective: To review Part of Speech (POS) tagging works that have been done for the Ethiopian languages. Methods: All methods that have been implemented to develop POS tagging for the Ethiopian languages have been mentioned. Findings: Since all implemented POS tagging methods have been mentioned in this work, the result will be used for future natural language processing researchers to select the best methodology. Novelty: The work includes all implemented POS tagging research works for the Ethiopian languages.

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