In recent years, unethical behavior in the cyber-environment has been revealed. The presence of offensive language on social media platforms and automatic detection of such language is becoming a major challenge in modern society. The complexity of natural language constructs makes this task even more challenging. Until now, most of the research has focused on resource-rich languages like English. Roman Urdu and Urdu are two scripts of writing the Urdu language on social media. The Roman script uses the English language characters while the Urdu script uses Urdu language characters. Urdu and Hindi languages are similar with the only difference in their writing script but the Roman scripts of both languages are similar. This study is about the detection of offensive language from the user’s comments presented in a resource-poor language Urdu. We propose the first offensive dataset of Urdu containing user-generated comments from social media. We use individual and combined n-grams techniques to extract features at character-level and word-level. We apply seventeen classifiers from seven machine learning techniques to detect offensive language from both Urdu and Roman Urdu text comments. Experiments show that the regression-based models using character n-grams shows superior performance to process the Urdu language. Character-level tri-gram outperforms the other word and character n-grams. LogitBoost and SimpleLogistic outperform the other models and achieve 99.2% and 95.9% values of F-measure on Roman Urdu and Urdu datasets respectively. Our designed dataset is publically available on GitHub for future research.

The rapid growth of electronic documents are causing problems like unstructured data that need more time and effort to search a relevant document. Text Document Classification (TDC) has a great significance in information processing and retrieval where unstructured documents are organized into pre-defined classes. Urdu is the most favorite research language in South Asian languages because of its complex morphology, unique features, and lack of linguistic resources like standard datasets. As compared to short text, like sentiment analysis, long text classification needs more time and effort because of large vocabulary, more noise, and redundant information. Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models have been widely used in text processing. Despite the major limitations of ML models, like learn directed features, these are the favorite methods for Urdu TDC. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first study of Urdu TDC using DL model. In this paper, we design a large multi-purpose and multi-format dataset that contain more than ten thousand documents organize into six classes. We use Single-layer Multisize Filters Convolutional Neural Network (SMFCNN) for classification and compare its performance with sixteen ML baseline models on three imbalanced datasets of various sizes. Further, we analyze the effects of preprocessing methods on SMFCNN performance. SMFCNN outperformed the baseline classifiers and achieved 95.4%, 91.8%, and 93.3% scores of accuracy on medium, large and small size dataset respectively. The designed dataset would be publically and freely available in different formats for future research in Urdu text processing.

Earthquake is a major hazard to humans, buildings, and infrastructure. Early warning systems should detect an earthquake and issue a warning with earthquake information such as location, magnitude, and depth. Earthquake detection from raw waveform data using deep learning models such as graph neural networks (GNN) is becoming an important research area. The multilayered structure of the GNN with a number of epochs takes more training time. It is also hard to train the model with saturating nonlinearities. The batch normalization technique is applied to each mini-batch to reduce epochs in training and obtain a steady distribution of activation values. It improves model training and prediction accuracy. This study proposes a deep learning model batch normalization graph convolutional neural network (BNGCNN) for early earthquake detection. It consists of two main components: CNN and GNN. Input to the CNN model is multi-station and three-component waveform data with magnitude $\ge 3.0$ were collected from January 2000 to January 2015 for Southern California. The extracted features of CNN are appended with location information and input to GNN model for earthquake detection. After hyperparameter tuning of the BNGCNN, when testing and evaluating the model on the Southern California dataset, our method shows promising results to the baseline model GNN by obtaining a low error rate to predict the magnitude, depth, and location of an earthquake.

From last decade, machine learning (ML) techniques have been used for Urdu text processing. Due to lack of language resources, potential of deep learning (DL) models have not been exploited yet for Urdu text document classification. A text document has more noise, redundant information, and large vocabulary than short text like tweets. This study is the systematic comparison of four well-known DL models. We also compare DL models with four ML models. We also explore the various text preprocessing techniques. Experimental results show that CNN outperforms the others. Further, single-layer architecture of LSTM and BiLSTM performs better than multiple-layers architecture.

Earthquakes threaten people, homes, and infrastructure. Early warning systems provide prior warning of oncoming significant shaking to decrease seismic risk by providing location, magnitude, and depth information of the event. Their usefulness depends on how soon a strong shake begins after the warning. In this article, the authors implement a deep learning model for predicting earthquakes. This model is based on a graph convolutional neural network with batch normalization and attention mechanism techniques that can successfully predict the depth and magnitude of an earthquake event at any number of seismic stations in any number of locations. After preprocessing the waveform data, CNN extracts the feature map. Attention mechanism is used to focus on important features. The batch normalization technique takes place in batches for stable and faster training of the model by adding an extra layer. GNN with extracted features and event location information predicts the event information accurately. We test the proposed model on two datasets from Japan and Alaska, which have different seismic dynamics. The proposed model achieves 2.8 and 4.0 RMSE values in Alaska and Japan for magnitude prediction, and 2.87 and 2.66 RMSE values for depth prediction. Low RMSE values show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the three baseline models on both datasets to provide an accurate estimation of the depth and magnitude of small, medium, and large-magnitude events.