Online media has an increasing presence on the restaurants’ activities through social media websites, coinciding with an increase in customers’ reviews of these restaurants. These reviews become the main source of information for both customers and decision-makers in this field. Any customer who is seeking such places will check their reviews first, which usually affect their final choice. In addition, customers’ experiences can be enhanced by utilizing other customers’ suggestions. Consequently, customers’ reviews can influence the success of restaurant business since it is considered the final judgment of the overall quality of any restaurant. Thus, decision-makers need to analyze their customers’ underlying sentiments in order to meet their expectations and improve the restaurants’ services, in terms of food quality, ambiance, price range, and customer service. The number of reviews available for various products and services has dramatically increased these days and so has the need for automated methods to collect and analyze these reviews. Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a field of machine learning that helps analyze and predict the sentiments underlying these reviews. Usually, SA for customers’ reviews face imbalanced datasets challenge, as the majority of these sentiments fall into supporters or resistors of the product or service. This work proposes a hybrid approach by combining the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and different oversampling techniques to handle the imbalanced data problem. SVM is applied as a machine learning classification technique to predict the sentiments of reviews by optimizing the dataset, which contains different reviews of several restaurants in Jordan. Data were collected from Jeeran, a well-known social network for Arabic reviews. A PSO technique is used to optimize the weights of the features, as well as four different oversampling techniques, namely, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), SVM-SMOTE, Adaptive Synthetic Sampling (ADASYN) and borderline-SMOTE were examined to produce an optimized dataset and solve the imbalanced problem of the dataset. This study shows that the proposed PSO-SVM approach produces the best results compared to different classification techniques in terms of accuracy, F-measure, G-mean and AUC, for different versions of the datasets.

Recently sentiment analysis in Arabic has attracted much attention from researchers. A modest number of studies have been conducted on Arabic sentiment analysis. However, due to the vast increase in users’ comments and reviews on social media and e-commerce websites, the necessity to detect sentence-level and aspect-level sentiments has also increased. The aspect-based sentiment analysis has emerged to detect sentiments at the aspect level. Few studies have attempted to perform aspect-based sentiment analysis on Arabic texts because Arabic natural language processing is a challenging task and because of the lack of available Arabic annotated corpora. In this paper, we conducted a systematic review of the methods, techniques, and datasets employed in aspect-based sentiment analysis on Arabic texts. A total of 21 articles published between 2015-2021 were included in this review. After analysing these articles, we found a lack of annotated datasets that can be used by researchers. In addition, the used datasets were limited to few fields. This review will serve as a foundation for researchers interested in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, it will assist them in developing new models and techniques to tackle this task in the future.

The world has witnessed recently a global outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This pandemic has affected many countries and has resulted in worldwide health concerns, thus governments are attempting to reduce its spread and impact on different aspects of life such as health, economics, education, and politics by making emergent decisions and policies (e.g., lockdown and social distancing). These new regulations influenced people’s daily life and cast significant burdens, concerns, and disparities on various population groups. Taking the wrong actions and enforcing bad decisions by some countries result in increasing the contagion rate and more catastrophic results. People start to post their opinions and feelings about their government’s decisions on different social media networks, and the data received through these platforms present a very useful source of information that affects how governments perceive and cope with the current the pandemic. Jordan was one of the top affected countries. In this paper, we proposed a decision support system based on the sentiment analysis mechanism by combining support vector machines with a whale optimization algorithm for automatically tuning the hyperparameters and performing feature weighting. The work is based on a hybrid evolutionary approach that aims to perform sentiment analysis combined with a decision support system to study people’s posts on Facebook to investigate their attitudes and feelings toward the government’s decisions during the pandemic. The government regulations were divided into two periods: the first and latter regulations. Studying public sentiments during these periods allows decision-makers in the government to sense people’s feelings, alert them in case of possible threats, and help in making proactive actions if needed to better handle the current pandemic situation. Five different versions were generated for each of the two collected datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed Whale Optimization Algorithm & Support Vector Machines (WOA-SVM) against other metaheuristic algorithms and standard classification models as WOA-SVM has achieved 78.78% in terms of accuracy and 84.64% in term of f-measure, while other standard classification models such as NB, k-NN, J84, and SVM achieved an accuracy of 69.25%, 69.78%, 70.17%, and 69.29%, respectively, with 64.15%, 62.90%, 60.51%, and 59.09% F-measure. Moreover, when comparing our proposed WOA-SVM approach with other metaheuristic algorithms, which are GA-SVM, PSO-SVM, and MVO-SVM, WOA-SVM proved to outperform the other approaches with results of 78.78% in terms of accuracy and 84.64% in terms of F-measure. Further, we investigate and analyze the most relevant features and their effect to improve the decision support system of government decisions.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of blended learning on the academic achievement of students in the University of Jordan. To gain in depth understanding of the phenomena under investigation, survey method is employed to collect natural data. For the sake of respondent convince all the questions asked in this survey are directed in Arabic language. Conventional sampling technique is employed due to the subjectivity of the issue. A sample of (427) students from King Abdulla II School for Information Technology at Jordan University are randomly selected. SPSS10 software is used to make statistical analysis. The robust checks of the result are made through arithmetic average, standard deviation statistics and Pearson correlation matrix. Statistical results of the study report that there is a significant and positive impact of blended learning on academic achievement of the students in university of Jordan.

Geospatial data analysis can be improved by using data-driven algorithms and techniques from the machine learning field. The aim of our research is to discover interrelationships among topographical data to support the decision-making process. In this paper, we extracted topographical geospatial data from digital elevation model (DEM) raster images, and we discovered hidden patterns among this data based on the K-means clustering algorithm, to uncover relationships and find clusters of elevation values for the area of Jordan. We introduce a method for querying and clustering geospatial data and we built an interactive map accordingly. The method discovers hidden patterns and uncovers relationships in given large datasets. We demonstrate the applicability of the method using the Jordan map and we report on geospatial data analysis and retrieval improvements. The results show that the optimal decision is in favor of four clusters (classes). The first class includes the high elevation values, the second class includes the very low elevation values, the third class includes the medium-high elevation values, and the fourth class includes the very high elevation values.

Due to the accelerated growth of symmetrical sentiment data across different platforms, experimenting with different sentiment analysis (SA) techniques allows for better decision-making and strategic planning for different sectors. Specifically, the emergence of COVID-19 has enriched the data of people’s opinions and feelings about medical products. In this paper, we analyze people’s sentiments about the products of a well-known e-commerce website named Alibaba.com. People’s sentiments are experimented with using a novel evolutionary approach by applying advanced pre-trained word embedding for word presentations and combining them with an evolutionary feature selection mechanism to classify these opinions into different levels of ratings. The proposed approach is based on harmony search algorithm and different classification techniques including random forest, k-nearest neighbor, AdaBoost, bagging, SVM, and REPtree to achieve competitive results with the least possible features. The experiments are conducted on five different datasets including medical gloves, hand sanitizer, medical oxygen, face masks, and a combination of all these datasets. The results show that the harmony search algorithm successfully reduced the number of features by 94.25%, 89.5%, 89.25%, 92.5%, and 84.25% for the medical glove, hand sanitizer, medical oxygen, face masks, and whole datasets, respectively, while keeping a competitive performance in terms of accuracy and root mean square error (RMSE) for the classification techniques and decreasing the computational time required for classification.