Bayan Abu Shawar
Arab Open University, Information Technology and Computing, Faculty Member
Research Interests:
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Chatbot tools are computer programs which interact with users using natural languages. This thesis shows that chatbot technology could be used in many different ways in addition to being a tool for having fun. A chatbot could be used as a... more
Chatbot tools are computer programs which interact with users using natural languages. This thesis shows that chatbot technology could be used in many different ways in addition to being a tool for having fun. A chatbot could be used as a tool to learn or to study a new language; a tool to access an information system, a tool to visualise the contents of a corpus; and a tool to give answers to questions in a specific domain. Instead of being restricted to a specific domain or written language, a chatbot could be trained with any text in any language. Some of the differences between real human conversations and human-chatbot dialogues are presented. A Java program has been developed to read a text from a machine readable text (corpus) and convert it to ALICE chatbot format language (AIML). The program was built to be general, the generality in this respect implies, no restrictions on specific language, domain, or structure. Different languages were tested: English, Arabic, Afrikaans,...
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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... more
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 that are related to content, context, activities, and deferent types of users of the LMS. The extracted information will be presented in different format such as text data, tables, charts, and figures. Also this information is going to be useful for different information seekers from deferent specialties including higher management, financial department, quality assurance agency, registration, local accreditation, academic supervisors, and external examiners. A case study on using the LMS at the Arab Open University (AOU) will be presented including many samples of extracted information and its usability. In summery, this paper introduces ...
Instance-Based learners are simple, yet, effective learners. They classify a new instance based on the k most similar instances which makes them sensitive to noise in training data sets. Obtaining good classification accuracy may,... more
Instance-Based learners are simple, yet, effective learners. They classify a new instance based on the k most similar instances which makes them sensitive to noise in training data sets. Obtaining good classification accuracy may, therefore, require cleaning the data sets using labor-extensive or computationally expensive data cleaning procedures. In this work, we present some Bayesian-based instance weighting techniques to make such learners more tolerant to noise. The basic idea is that typical or classical instances should be given more weight or voting power than less typical or noisy instances. We present three techniques to determine instance weights that are based on the conditional probability of an instance belonging to its actual class and not to another class. Our empirical results using the kNN algorithm shows that all presented techniques are effective in making the kNN more tolerant to noise. These results suggest that these techniques can be used with instance based l...
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The Quran is held by Muslims to be a single-authored text, the direct words of God (Allah), conveyed by the angel Gabriel to Mohammed 1355-1378 years ago, and later transcribed verbatim to be used as the sole authoritative source of... more
The Quran is held by Muslims to be a single-authored text, the direct words of God (Allah), conveyed by the angel Gabriel to Mohammed 1355-1378 years ago, and later transcribed verbatim to be used as the sole authoritative source of knowledge, wisdom and law. The challenge for computer scientists is to represent this knowledge, wisdom and law in computer systems: to build intelligent systems which can answer any question with knowledge from the Quran, and can help society, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to understand and appreciate the Quran.
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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... more
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 activities in an optimal way. Accordingly, there is a need to improve the existing learning management system to guarantee the implementation of such quality assurance regulations electronically to save time and cost and to perform all required procedures. In addition of describing the improvements, this paper also conducts a comparison between conforming with such regulations manually and the new online procedures over the learning management system.
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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... more
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 such as: reports, meeting to exchange opinions and experiences from the gathering database repository and related expert systems. e-learning is basically concern of delivering learning materials to its target users via e-learning platforms or in other words via the learning management systems (LMS). In this paper we discuss the similarities and differences between knowledge management and e-learning. In more specific, the relationship between our learning management system used at Arab Open University and knowledge management systems is presented. We explore the main factors of LMS by displaying how these aspects can be extracted from such...
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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... more
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 Answers, so there is no need for NL generation to recreate well-formed answers, or for deep analysis or logical inference to map user input questions onto this logical ontology; simple (but large) set of pattern-template matching rules will suffice. In previous research, this works properly with English and other European languages. In this paper, we try to see how the same chatbot will react in terms of Arabic FAQs. Initial results shows that 93% of answers were correct, but because of a lot of characteristics related to Arabic language, changing Arabic questions into other forms may lead to no answers.
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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... more
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 platforms is presented. The paper also presents in detail
Research Interests: Computer Science, Teaching and Learning, E Learning Management System, Online Learning, Human Resource, and 14 moreDistance Learning, Open Source, Open University, Learning Environment, Face to Face, Learning Management System, Quality of Education, Learning management, Online Courses, Development Process, Open Learning, Boolean Satisfiability, Learning Outcome, and Student Information System
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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... more
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 Afrikaans. This paper presents a program to learn from spoken transcripts of the Dialogue Diversity Corpus of English, the Minnesota French Corpus, the Corpus of Spoken Afrikaans, the Qur'an Arabic-English parallel corpus, and the British National Corpus of English; we discuss the problems which arose during learning and testing. Two main goals were achieved from the automation process. One was the ability to generate different versions of the chatbot in different languages, bringing chatbot technology to languages with few if any NLP resources: the corpus-based learning techniques transferred straightforwardly to develop chatbots for ...
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... Accessing an Information System by Chatting Bayan Abu Shawar and Eric Atwell ... 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... more
... Accessing an Information System by Chatting Bayan Abu Shawar and Eric Atwell ... 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. ...
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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... more
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 recreate well-formed answers, or for deep analysis or logical inference to map user input questions onto this logical ontology; simple (but large) set of pattern-template matching rules will suffice. In previous research, this approach works properly with English and other European languages. In this paper, we try to see how the same chatbot will react in terms of Arabic Web QA corpus. Initial results shows that 93% of answers were correct, but because of a lot of characteristics related to Arabic language, changing Arabic questions into other forms may lead to no answers.
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... e-Assignments) Allow personalization (user profiles, custom news, recent activity, RSS) Enablemonitoring activities (QA ... Students attendance and absences ... For example, wireless classroom response systems can be integrated... more
... e-Assignments) Allow personalization (user profiles, custom news, recent activity, RSS) Enablemonitoring activities (QA ... Students attendance and absences ... For example, wireless classroom response systems can be integrated into classroom instructions to gather students ...
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ABSTRACT 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... more
ABSTRACT 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 generated by search engines such as Google. For evaluation, a comparison was made between FAQchat and Google. The main objective is to demonstrate that FAQchat is a viable alternative to Google and it can be used as a tool to access FAQ databases.
This collection of short papers is a bird's eye view of current research in Corpus Linguistics, Machine Learning and Evaluation at Leeds University. The papers are extended abstracts submitted to CL2003, the International Conference... more
This collection of short papers is a bird's eye view of current research in Corpus Linguistics, Machine Learning and Evaluation at Leeds University. The papers are extended abstracts submitted to CL2003, the International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, Lancaster University, March 2003; the full papers appear in the CL2003 Proceedings (Archer et al 2003), except for (Hu and Atwell 2003), which is in the Proceedings of the pre-conference workshop on Shallow Processing of Large Corpora, SProLaC (Simov and Osenova 2003). ...
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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... more
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 pages are widely accessible. Assistive technology is used to increase, improve, and maintain capabilities of disabled persons to execute tasks that are sometimes difficult or impossible to do without technical aid. Also it helps them achieve their scholar, professional and social integration. We are mainly interested in assistive technology aimed to facilitate the use of a computer by visually impaired person. This study focuses on studying existing standards and investigating its applicability of educational institute websites. This will encourage accessibility of e-learning materials that are provided by these universities. We will take Jo...
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... Some of the differences between real human conversations and human-chatbot dialogues are presented. ... A chatbot system as a tool to animate a corpus. Bayan Abu Shawar, Eric Atwell in ICAME Journal (2005). Save reference to library ·... more
... Some of the differences between real human conversations and human-chatbot dialogues are presented. ... A chatbot system as a tool to animate a corpus. Bayan Abu Shawar, Eric Atwell in ICAME Journal (2005). Save reference to library · Related research 2 readers. ...
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... Page 4. 5 Conclusion Arab Open University presents all of its courses over the learning management system MOODLE. ... [9] Barranco G., Castillo J., Cordoba S., Bonilla A., Sanchez F., Ruiz M., Vida J., Casermeiro E., Ortega P., Garcia... more
... Page 4. 5 Conclusion Arab Open University presents all of its courses over the learning management system MOODLE. ... [9] Barranco G., Castillo J., Cordoba S., Bonilla A., Sanchez F., Ruiz M., Vida J., Casermeiro E., Ortega P., Garcia G., Cielos P., and Dominguez Y. FERMAT: ...
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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... more
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 increase, improve, and maintain capabilities of disabled persons to execute tasks that are sometimes difficult or impossible to do without technical aid. Also it helps them achieve their scholar, professional and social activities. This paper exposes an approach to investigate accessible contents of educational websites to ensure and measure its compliance with accessibility standards for visually impaired people. This study focuses on studying existing standards and investigating its applicability on educational institute websites. This will increase accessibility on e-learning materials that are provided by educational institutes. In this ...
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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... more
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 that are more suitable for noisy data sets. We use the Naïve Bayesian probability that an instance truly belongs to its class or does not belong to another class, to calculate its weight. Our empirical study shows that these weighting techniques make the kNN algorithm far less sensitive to noisy training data.
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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... more
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 pages are widely accessible. Assistive technology is used to increase, improve, and maintain capabilities of disabled persons to execute tasks that are sometimes difficult or impossible to do without technical aid. Also it helps them achieve their scholar, professional and social integration. We are mainly interested in assistive technology aimed to facilitate the use of a computer by visually impaired person. This study focuses on studying existing standards and investigating its applicability of educational institute websites. This will encourage accessibility of e-learning materials that are provided by these universities. We will take Jo...
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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... more
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 of Arab Open University (AOU) at Jordan branch.
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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.... more
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 has used a parallel Arabic-English corpus for teaching, but there appear to be no other institutions adopting this approach. A factor is the limited number of freely available Arabic corpora and tools that can process the data adequately. We report on the use of a free open-source corpus of contemporary Arabic of around one million words, covering a variety of text genres such as science, novels, religion etc.; used in conjunction with a free open-source concordance, aConCorde, which can analyse and display Arabic concordances appropriately. We demonstrate some of the difficulties learners have in learning contemporary Arabic and give samples of corpus-based concordance activities which aim to overcome these difficulties. We illustrate how the corpus of contemporary Arabic and aConCorde can be used to complement learning from a standard Arabic language course book. We also present the use of a trainable chatbot, trained with a corpus of Arabic, to provide online conversation practice for learners. We conclude that using a corpus and concordance not only exposes the learners to authentic texts but also assists them in exploring the language and finding its rules and meanings independently.
ABSTRACT 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... more
ABSTRACT 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 of customization of Blackboard done in JU is presented. Other computerized systems in JU are highlighted, such as the Student Information System (SIS), and Human Resource System (HRS), and a comparison is done between e-learning systems in JU and those of Arab Open University (AOU).
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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... more
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 are behind the inspiration of e-learning approach. In which the computer is used as a medium to deliver and share educational materials and knowledge instead of face-to-face tutoring. This makes education available to any one, any place, and any time as learner need. This paper presents the relationship between knowledge management and learning management system (LMS) that is used in e-learning paradigms. A detailed description of the LMS used at Arab Open University (AOU) is included in this paper. We claim that the LMS used at AOU can be considered as a knowledge management tool.