Nagwa M. El-Makky

Also published as: Nagwa El-Makky


2023

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Alex-U 2023 NLP at WojoodNER shared task: AraBINDER (Bi-encoder for Arabic Named Entity Recognition)
Mariam Hussein | Sarah Khaled | Marwan Torki | Nagwa El-Makky
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a crucial task in natural language processing that facilitates the extraction of vital information from text. However, NER for Arabic presents a significant challenge due to the language’s unique characteristics. In this paper, we introduce AraBINDER, our submission to the Wojood NER Shared Task 2023 (ArabicNLP 2023). The shared task comprises two sub-tasks: sub-task 1 focuses on Flat NER, while sub-task 2 centers on Nested NER. We have participated in both sub-tasks. The Bi-Encoder has proven its efficiency for NER in English. We employ AraBINDER (Arabic Bi-Encoder for Named Entity Recognition), which uses the power of two transformer encoders and employs contrastive learning to map candidate text spans and entity types into the same vector representation space. This approach frames NER as a representation learning problem that maximizes the similarity between the vector representations of an entity mention and its type. Our experiments reveal that AraBINDER achieves a micro F-1 score of 0.918 for Flat NER and 0.9 for Nested NER on the Wojood dataset.

2022

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Arabic Dialect Identification with a Few Labeled Examples Using Generative Adversarial Networks
Mahmoud Yusuf | Marwan Torki | Nagwa El-Makky
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Given the challenges and complexities introduced while dealing with Dialect Arabic (DA) variations, Transformer based models, e.g., BERT, outperformed other models in dealing with the DA identification task. However, to fine-tune these models, a large corpus is required. Getting a large number high quality labeled examples for some Dialect Arabic classes is challenging and time-consuming. In this paper, we address the Dialect Arabic Identification task. We extend the transformer-based models, ARBERT and MARBERT, with unlabeled data in a generative adversarial setting using Semi-Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (SS-GAN). Our model enabled producing high-quality embeddings for the Dialect Arabic examples and aided the model to better generalize for the downstream classification task given few labeled examples. Experimental results showed that our model reached better performance and faster convergence when only a few labeled examples are available.

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AlexU-AL at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Detecting Sarcasm in Arabic Text Using Deep Learning Techniques
Aya Lotfy | Marwan Torki | Nagwa El-Makky
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

Sarcasm detection is an important task in Natural Language Understanding. Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony that occurs when there is a discrepancy between the literal and intended meanings of an expression. In this paper, we use the tweets of the Arabic dataset provided by SemEval-2022 task 6 to train deep learning classifiers to solve the sub-tasks A and C associated with the dataset. Sub-task A is to determine if the tweet is sarcastic or not. For sub-task C, given a sarcastic text and its non-sarcastic rephrase, i.e. two texts that convey the same meaning, determine which is the sarcastic one. In our solution, we utilize fine-tuned MARBERT (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021) model with an added single linear layer on top for classification. The proposed solution achieved 0.5076 F1-sarcastic in Arabic sub-task A, accuracy of 0.7450 and F-score of 0.7442 in Arabic sub-task C. We achieved the 2nd and the 9th places for Arabic sub-tasks A and C respectively.

2020

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AlexU-BackTranslation-TL at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Improving Offensive Language Detection Using Data Augmentation and Transfer Learning
Mai Ibrahim | Marwan Torki | Nagwa El-Makky
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Social media platforms, online news commenting spaces, and many other public forums have become widely known for issues of abusive behavior such as cyber-bullying and personal attacks. In this paper, we use the annotated tweets of the Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID) to train three levels of deep learning classifiers to solve the three sub-tasks associated with the dataset. Sub-task A is to determine if the tweet is toxic or not. Then, for offensive tweets, sub-task B requires determining whether the toxicity is targeted. Finally, for sub-task C, we predict the target of the offense; i.e. a group, individual, or other entity. In our solution, we tackle the problem of class imbalance in the dataset by using back translation for data augmentation and utilizing the fine-tuned BERT model in an ensemble of deep learning classifiers. We used this solution to participate in the three English sub-tasks of SemEval-2020 task 12. The proposed solution achieved 0.91393, 0.6300, and 0.57607 macro F1-average in sub-tasks A, B, and C respectively. We achieved the 9th, 14th, and 22nd places for sub-tasks A, B and C respectively.

2019

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Question Answering Using Hierarchical Attention on Top of BERT Features
Reham Osama | Nagwa El-Makky | Marwan Torki
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

The model submitted works as follows. When supplied a question and a passage it makes use of the BERT embedding along with the hierarchical attention model which consists of 2 parts, the co-attention and the self-attention, to locate a continuous span of the passage that is the answer to the question.

2015

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Al-Bayan: A Knowledge-based System for Arabic Answer Selection
Reham Mohamed | Maha Ragab | Heba Abdelnasser | Nagwa M. El-Makky | Marwan Torki
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)

2014

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Al-Bayan: An Arabic Question Answering System for the Holy Quran
Heba Abdelnasser | Maha Ragab | Reham Mohamed | Alaa Mohamed | Bassant Farouk | Nagwa El-Makky | Marwan Torki
Proceedings of the EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP)