Metaverse is a vast term that can contain every digital thing in the future. Therefore, life domains, such as learning and education, should have their systems redirected to adopt this topic to keep their availability and longevity. Many papers have discussed the metaverse, the applications to run on, and the historical progress to have the metaverse the way it is today. However, the framework of the metaverse itself is still unclear, and its components cannot be exactly specified. Although E-Learning systems are a need that has developed over the years along with technology, the structures of the available E-Learning systems based on the metaverse are either not well described or are adopted, in their best case, as just a 3D environment. In this paper, we examine some previous works to find out the special technologies that should be provided by the metaverse framework, then we discuss the framework of the metaverse if applied as an E-Learning environment framework. This will make it easy to develop future metaverse-based applications, as the proposed framework will make the virtual learning environments work smoothly on the metaverse. In addition, E-Learning will be a more interactive and pleasant process.

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be a pandemic. Soon af-terwards, people began sharing millions of posts on social media without considering their reliability and truthfulness. While there has been extensive research on COVID-19 in the English lan-guage, there is a lack of research on the subject in Arabic. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting fake news surrounding COVID-19 in Arabic tweets. We collected more than seven million Arabic tweets related to the corona virus pandemic from January 2020 to August 2020 using the trending hashtags during the time of pandemic. We relied on two fact-checkers: the France-Press Agency and the Saudi Anti-Rumors Authority to extract a list of keywords related to the misinformation and fake news topics. A small corpus was extracted from the collected tweets and manually annotated into fake or genuine classes. We used a set of features extracted from tweet contents to train a set of machine learning classifiers. The manually annotated corpus was used as a baseline to build a system for automatically detecting fake news from Arabic text. Classification of the manually annotated dataset achieved an F1-score of 87.8% using Logistic Regression (LR) as a classifier with the n-gram-level Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) as a feature, and a 93.3% F1-score on the automatically annotated dataset using the same classifier with count vector feature. The introduced system and datasets could help governments, decision-makers, and the public judge the credibility of information published on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At a time when research in the field of sentiment analysis tends to study advanced topics in languages, such as English, other languages such as Arabic still suffer from basic problems and challenges, most notably the availability of large corpora. Furthermore, manual annotation is time-consuming and difficult when the corpus is too large. This paper presents a semi-supervised self-learning technique, to extend an Arabic sentiment annotated corpus with unlabeled data, named AraSenCorpus. We use a neural network to train a set of models on a manually labeled dataset containing 15,000 tweets. We used these models to extend the corpus to a large Arabic sentiment corpus called “AraSenCorpus”. AraSenCorpus contains 4.5 million tweets and covers both modern standard Arabic and some of the Arabic dialects. The long-short term memory (LSTM) deep learning classifier is used to train and test the final corpus. We evaluate our proposed framework on two external benchmark datasets to ensure the improvement of the Arabic sentiment classification. The experimental results show that our corpus outperforms the existing state-of-the-art systems.

Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) started from Wuhan, China, in late December 2019. It swept most of the world’s countries with confirmed cases and deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus a pandemic on 11 March 2020 due to its widespread transmission. A public health crisis was declared in specific regions and nation-wide by governments all around the world. Citizens have gone through a wide range of emotions, such as fear of shortage of food, anger at the performance of governments and health authorities in facing the virus, sadness over the deaths of friends or relatives, etc. We present a monitoring system of citizens’ concerns using emotion detection in Twitter data. We also track public emotions and link these emotions with COVID-19 symptoms. We aim to show the effect of emotion monitoring on improving people’s daily health behavior and reduce the spread of negative emotions that affect the mental health of citizens. We collected and annotated 5.5 million tweets in the period from January to August 2020. A hybrid approach combined rule-based and neural network techniques to annotate the collected tweets. The rule-based technique was used to classify 300,000 tweets relying on Arabic emotion and COVID-19 symptom lexicons while the neural network was used to expand the sample tweets that were annotated using the rule-based technique. We used long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning to classify all of the tweets into six emotion classes and two types (symptom and non-symptom tweets). The monitoring system shows that most of the tweets were posted in March 2020. The anger and fear emotions have the highest number of tweets and user interactions after the joy emotion. The results of user interaction monitoring show that people use likes and replies to interact with non-symptom tweets while they use re-tweets to propagate tweets that mention any of COVID-19 symptoms. Our study should help governments and decision-makers to dispel people’s fears and discover new symptoms associated with the symptoms that were declared by the WHO. It can also help in the understanding of people’s mental and emotional issues to address them before the impact of disease anxiety becomes harmful in itself.

The accumulation of salt through natural causes and human artifice, such as saline inundation or mineral weathering, is marked as salinization, but the hindrance toward spatial mapping of soil salinity has somewhat remained a consistent riddle despite decades of efforts. The purpose of the current study is the spatial mapping of soil salinity in Kot Addu (situated in the south of the Punjab province, Pakistan) using Landsat 8 data in five advanced machine learning regression models, i.e., Random Forest Regressor, AdaBoost Regressor, Decision Tree Regressor, Partial Least Squares Regression and Ridge Regressor. For this purpose, spectral data were obtained between 20 and 27 of January 2017 and a field survey was carried out to gather a total of fifty-five soil samples. To evaluate and compare the model’s performances, the coefficient of determination (R²), Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and the Root-Mean-Squared Error (RMSE) were used. Spectral data of band values, salinity indices and vegetation indices were employed to study the salinity of soil. The results revealed that the Random Forest Regressor outperformed the other models in terms of prediction, achieving an R² of 0.94, MAE of 1.42 dS/m, MSE of 3.58 dS/m and RMSE of 1.89 dS/m when using the Differential Vegetation Index (DVI). Alternatively, when using the Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI), the Random Forest Regressor achieved an R² of 0.93, MAE of 1.46 dS/m, MSE of 3.90 dS/m and RMSE of 1.97 dS/m. Hence, remote sensing technology with machine learning models is an efficient method for the assessment of soil salinity at local scales. This study will contribute to mitigating osmotic stress and minimizing the risk of soil erosion by providing early warnings regarding soil salinity. Additionally, it will assist agriculture officers in estimating soil salinity levels within a shorter time frame and at a reduced cost, enabling effective resource allocation.