With the increase of cyber-attacks and security threats in the recent decade, it is necessary to safeguard sensitive data and provide robust protection to information systems and computer networks. In this paper, an anomaly-based network outlier detection system (NODS) is proposed and optimized to check and classify the incoming network traffic stream’s behaviours that affect the computer networks. The proposed NODS has high classification efficiency. Network connection events classified as outliers are reported to the network admin to drop and block its packets. The NSL-KDD and CICIDS2017 intrusion datasets were employed to build the proposed system and test its detection capabilities. Sequential scenarios were implemented to optimize the system’s effectiveness. Network features were normalized by min-max and Z-Score approaches, while the relevant features were selected individually by the principal component analysis (PCA) and correlated features selection (CFS) techniques. Support vector machine (SVM) and Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) algorithms are used to build the detection model, while the Genetic algorithm (GA) was employed to tune their control parameters. The obtained evaluation results proved that the proposed SVM based NODS is characterized by low false alarms and detection time as well as high classification accuracy. Furthermore, a comparative analysis was conducted with other existing techniques, and the results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SVM-IDS.

Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task in natural language processing, as it is widely featured as a key information extraction sub-task with numerous application areas. A plethora of attempts was made for NER detection in Western and Asian languages. However, little effort has been made to develop techniques for the Urdu language, which is a prominent South Asian language with hundreds of millions of speakers across the globe. NER in Urdu is considered a hard problem owing to several reasons, including the paucity of large, annotated datasets; an inaccurate tokenizer; and the absence of capitalization in the Urdu language. To this end, this study proposed a conditional-random-field-based technique with both language-dependent and language-independent features, such as part-of-speech tags and context windows of words, respectively. As a second contribution, we developed an Urdu NER dataset (UNER-I) in which a large number of NE types were manually annotated. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, as well as the usefulness of the dataset, experiments were performed using the dataset we developed and an existing dataset. The results of the experiments showed that our proposed technique outperformed the baseline technique for both datasets by improving the F1 scores by 1.5% to 3%. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that the enhanced dataset was useful for learning and prediction in a supervised learning approach.

Climate change’s impact on human health poses unprecedented and diverse challenges. Unless proactive measures based on solid evidence are implemented, these threats will likely escalate and continue to endanger human well-being. The escalating advancements in information and communication technologies have facilitated the widespread availability and utilization of social media platforms. Individuals utilize platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to express their opinions, thoughts, and critiques on diverse subjects, encompassing the pressing issue of climate change. The proliferation of climate change-related content on social media necessitates comprehensive analysis to glean meaningful insights. This paper employs natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze climate change discourse and quantify the sentiment of climate change-related tweets. We collected a total number of 5506 tweets for the period of January 2022 and February 2023 and manually labeled them to make the dataset for this experiment. ClimateBERT, a pre-trained model fine-tuned specifically on the climate change domain was used to generate the context vectors. Several machine learning algorithms with different feature encoding techniques, such as TF-IDF and BERT, have been implemented to classify user sentiments. When comparing the performance of the classifiers using different evaluation metrics such as precision, recall, accuracy, and f-measure, the ClimateBERT + Random Forest model is found to be outperforming all the other baselines with an accuracy of 90.22%, recall of 85.22%, and an f-measure of 85.47%. The findings from this experiment unearth valuable insights into public sentiment and the entities associated with climate change discourse. Policymakers, researchers, and organizations can leverage such analyses to understand public perceptions, identify influential actors, and devise informed strategies to address climate change challenges.