Acquired images for medical and other purposes can be affected by noise from both the equipment used in the capturing or the environment. This can have adverse effect on the information therein. Thus, the need to restore the image to its original state by removing the noise. To effectively remove such noise, pre knowledge of the type of noise model present is necessary. This work explores different noise removal filters by first introducing noise to an image and then applying different spatial domain filtering techniques to the image to get rid of the noise. Different evaluation techniques such as Peak to Signal Noise Ratio(PSNR) and Root Mean Square Error(RMSE) were adopted to determine how effective each filter is on a given image noise. Result showed that some filters are more effective on some noise models than others.

LaTeX is a free document preparation system that handles the typesetting of mathematical expressions smoothly and elegantly. It has become the standard format for creating and publishing research articles in mathematics and many scientific fields. Computer-based testing (CBT) has become widespread in recent years. Most establishments now use it to deliver assessments as an alternative to using the pen-paper method. To deliver an assessment, the examiner would first add a new exam or edit an existing exam using a CBT editor. Thus, the implementation of CBT should comprise both support for setting and administering questions. Existing CBT applications used in the academic space lacks the capacity to handle advanced formulas, programming codes, and tables, thereby resorting to converting them into images which takes a lot of time and storage space. In this paper, we discuss how we solvde this problem by integrating latex technology into our CBT applications. This enables seamless manipulation and accurate rendering of tables, programming codes, and equations to increase readability and clarity on both the setting and administering of questions platforms. Furthermore, this implementation has reduced drastically the sizes of system resources allocated to converting tables, codes, and equations to images. Those in mathematics, statistics, computer science, engineering, chemistry, etc. will find this application useful.

In recent years, advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have revolutionized the field of accessibility and exclusivity of testing, particularly for visually impaired students (VIS). CBT has shown in years back its relevance in terms of administering exams electronically, making the test process easier, providing quicker and more accurate results, and offering greater flexibility and accessibility for candidates. Yet, its relevance was not felt by the visually impaired students as they cannot access printed documents. Hence, in this paper, we present an NLP-driven Computer-Based Test guide for visually impaired students. It employs a speech technology pre-trained methods to provide real-time assistance and support to visually impaired students. The system utilizes NLP technologies to convert the text-based questions and the associated options in a machine-readable format. Subsequently, the speech technology pre-trained model processes the converted text enabling the VIS to comprehend and analyze the content. Furthermore, we validated that this pre-trained model is not perverse by testing for accuracy using sample audio datasets labels (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) to compare with the voice recordings obtained from 20 VIS which is been predicted by the system to attain values for precision, recall, and F1-scores. These metrics are used to assess the performance of the pre-trained model and have indicated that it is proficient enough to give its better performance to the evaluated system. The methodology adopted for this system is Object Oriented Analysis and Design Methodology (OOADM) where Objects are discussed and built by modeling real-world instances.

This article looked at the concept of a pandemic as witnessed in 2020 and developed a system (smart classroom door) that can come in handy in the event of a similar situation, particularly in a school environment. Sensors and microcontrollers were integrated into the classroom door to observe, implement and help enforce the guidelines marshaled out as criteria for lifting the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020. A high-performance computer board was used to integrate hardware devices that provided web interfaces for applications. Python programming language was used in the implementation because it is supported by commercial and open-source operating systems used in the work. Firebase database is used for cloud recording and synchronization in real time with every connected client. The system recognized the profiled students and also identified when a recognized face eventually puts on a face mask before granting such student access to enter the classroom. Any face that was recognized but failed to put on a face mask when prompted to do so was not granted access. Whenever access is granted to a student, the system smoothly updates the Firebase in real time. The system was also able to mark an offline attendance whenever there was no Internet connection.

In this paper, we present MasakhaPOS, the largest part-of-speech (POS) dataset for 20 typologically diverse African languages. We discuss the challenges in annotating POS for these languages using the UD (universal dependencies) guidelines. We conducted extensive POS baseline experiments using conditional random field and several multilingual pre-trained language models. We applied various cross-lingual transfer models trained with data available in UD. Evaluating on the MasakhaPOS dataset, we show that choosing the best transfer language(s) in both single-source and multi-source setups greatly improves the POS tagging performance of the target languages, in particular when combined with cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Crucially, transferring knowledge from a language that matches the language family and morphosyntactic properties seems more effective for POS tagging in unseen languages.

Driving is a complex and dynamic task requiring drivers not only to make accurate perceptions and cognitions about the information on the driver’s driving skill but also to process this information at a high speed. This paper compared three major image processing/machine learning algorithms viz; Single Shot Multibox Detection (SSD), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and support vector machine (SVM) to find the fastest and most efficient of the three with regards to the dataset from driving events (braking, speeding and safe driving) collected from Nigeria. The results analyzed showed that in an identical testing environment, Support Vector Machine outperformed Single Shot Detection and Convolutional Neural Networks.

Nigeria president Buhari defeated his closest rival Atiku Abubakar by over 3 million votes. He was issued a Certificate of Return and was sworn in on 29 May 2019. However, there were claims of widespread hoax by the opposition. The sentiment analysis captures the opinions of the masses over social media for global events. In this paper, we use 2019 Nigeria presidential election tweets to perform sentiment analysis through the application of a voting ensemble approach (VEA) in which the predictions from multiple techniques are combined to find the best polarity of a tweet (sentence). This is to determine public views on the 2019 Nigeria Presidential elections and compare them with actual election results. Our sentiment analysis experiment is focused on location-based viewpoints where we used Twitter location data. For this experiment, we live-streamed Nigeria 2019 election tweets via Twitter API to create tweets dataset of 583816 size, pre-processed the data, and applied VEA by utilizing three different Sentiment Classifiers to obtain the choicest polarity of a given tweet. Furthermore, we segmented our tweets dataset into Nigerian states and geopolitical zones, then plotted state-wise and geopolitical-wise user sentiments towards Buhari and Atiku and their political parties. The overall objective of the use of states/geopolitical zones is to evaluate the similarity between the sentiment of location-based tweets compared to actual election results. The results reveal that whereas there are election outcomes that coincide with the sentiment expressed on Twitter social media in most cases as shown by the polarity scores of different locations, there are also some election results where our location analysis similarity test failed.

Websites are regarded as domains of limitless information which anyone and everyone can access. The new trend of technology put us to change the way we are doing our business. The Internet now is fastly becoming a new place for business and the advancement in this technology gave rise to the number of e-commerce websites. This made the lifestyle of marketers/vendors, retailers and consumers (collectively regarded as users in this paper) easy, because it provides easy platforms to sale/order items through the internet. This also requires that the users will have to spend a lot of time and effort to search for the best product deals, products updates and offers on e-commerce websites. They have to filter and compare search results by themselves which takes a lot of time and there are chances of ambiguous results. In this paper, we applied web crawling and scraping methods on an e-commerce website to get HTML data for identifying products updates based on the current time. The HTML data is preprocessed to extract details of the products such as name, price, post date and time, etc. to serve as useful information for users.

Automatic multiple-choice question generation (MCQG) is a useful yet challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It is the task of automatic generation of correct and relevant questions from textual data. Despite its usefulness, manually creating sizeable, meaningful and relevant questions is a time-consuming and challenging task for teachers. In this paper, we present an NLP-based system for automatic MCQG for Computer-Based Testing Examination (CBTE).We used NLP technique to extract keywords that are important words in a given lesson material. To validate that the system is not perverse, five lesson materials were used to check the effectiveness and efficiency of the system. The manually extracted keywords by the teacher were compared to the auto-generated keywords and the result shows that the system was capable of extracting keywords from lesson materials in setting examinable questions. This outcome is presented in a user-friendly interface for easy accessibility.

Recently, there are unprecedented data growth originating from different online platforms which contribute to big data in terms of volume, velocity, variety and veracity (4Vs). Given this nature of big data which is unstructured, performing analytics to extract meaningful information is currently a great challenge to big data analytics. Collecting and analyzing unstructured textual data allows decision makers to study the escalation of comments/posts on our social media platforms. Hence, there is need for automatic big data analysis to overcome the noise and the non-reliability of these unstructured dataset from the digital media platforms. However, current machine learning algorithms used are performance driven focusing on the classification/prediction accuracy based on known properties learned from the training samples. With the learning task in a large dataset, most machine learning models are known to require high computational cost which eventually leads to computational complexity. In this work, two supervised machine learning algorithms are combined with text mining techniques to produce a hybrid model which consists of Naïve Bayes and support vector machines (SVM). This is to increase the efficiency and accuracy of the results obtained and also to reduce the computational cost and complexity. The system also provides an open platform where a group of persons with a common interest can share their comments/messages and these comments classified automatically as legal or illegal. This improves the quality of conversation among users. The hybrid model was developed using WEKA tools and Java programming language. The result shows that the hybrid model gave 96.76% accuracy as against the 61.45% and 69.21% of the Naïve Bayes and SVM models respectively.

Automatic multiple-choice question generation (MCQG) is a useful yet challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It is the task of automatic generation of correct and relevant questions from textual data. Despite its usefulness, manually creating sizeable, meaningful and relevant questions is a time-consuming and challenging task for teachers. In this paper, we present an NLP-based system for automatic MCQG for Computer-Based Testing Examination (CBTE).We used NLP technique to extract keywords that are important words in a given lesson material. To validate that the system is not perverse, five lesson materials were used to check the effectiveness and efficiency of the system. The manually extracted keywords by the teacher were compared to the auto-generated keywords and the result shows that the system was capable of extracting keywords from lesson materials in setting examinable questions. This outcome is presented in a user-friendly interface for easy accessibility.

Deep learning-Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)) algorithms have made considerable improvements beyond the state-of-the-art records for automatic classification of satellite images for land cover mapping. However, its use brings forward significant new challenges for developing countries such as Nigeria. This is majorly due to the scarcity of labeled high resolution dataset, as training a high performing model requires images with fine details as well as huge amount of labeled data to learn from. In this paper we designed and implemented a novel deep learning framework that can effectively classify pixels in a medium resolution satellite image into 5 major land cover classes. To achieve this purpose, we developed a CNN model from a pretrained ResNet-50, retrained using EuroSAT, a large-scale medium resolution satellite dataset. We further integrated Augmentation and Ensemble learning techniques to the model to create a unique model able to generalize to unseen data. To test the performance of the model, we created image patches from satellite images of cites in Nigeria (NigSAT). The final classification results shows that our model achieves a 96% and 80% accuracy on EuroSAT and NigSAT test data respectively. The model is expected to improve the efficiency and accuracy of satellite image classification tasks in developing countries where there is scarcity of large-scale training dataset, thus providing a more reliable and faster access to land cover information.

Developing an automatic part-of-speech (POS) tagging for any new language is considered a necessary step for further computational linguistics methodology beyond tagging, like chunking and parsing, to be fully applied to the language. Many POS disambiguation technologies have been developed for this type of research and there are factors that influence the choice of choosing one. This could be either corpus-based or non-corpus-based. In this paper, we present a review of POS tagging technologies.

Due to the increasing storage data on the Web Applications it becomes very difficult to use only keywordbased searches to provide comprehensive search results, thus increasing the difficulty for web users to search information on the web. In this paper, we proposed using a combined method of keyword-based and Regular expressions (RegEx) searches to perform search using strings of targeted items for optimal results even as the volume of data around the world on the Internet continues to explode. The idea is to embed RegEx patterns as part of search engine’s algorithm in a web application project to provide strings related to the targeted items for more comprehensive coverage of search results. The user's search query is a string of characters guided by search boundaries selected from the entry point. The results returned from the search operation are different results within a category determined by the search boundaries. This is designed to be beneficial to a user who has an obscure idea about the information he/she wanted to search but knows the boundries within which to get the information. This technique can be applied to data processing tasks such as information extraction and search refinements.

This work investigates empirically the impact of political party control over its candidates or vice versa on winning an election using a natural language processing technique called sentiment analysis (SA). To do this, a set of 7430 tweets bearing or related to #AnambraDecides2017 was streamed during the November 18, 2017, Anambra State gubernatorial election. These are Twitter discussions on the top five political parties and their candidates termed political actors in this paper. We conduct polarity and subjectivity sentiment analyses on all the tweets considering time as a useful dimension of SA. Furthermore, we use the word frequency to find words most associated with the political actors in a given time. We find most talked about topics using a topic modeling algorithm and how the computed sentiments and most frequent words are related to the topics per political actor. Among other things, we deduced from the experimental results that even though a political party serves as a platform that sales the personality of a candidate, the acceptance of the candidate/party adds to the winning of an election. For example, we found the winner of the election Willie Obiano benefiting from the values his party share among the people of the State. Associating his name with his party, All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) displays more positive sentiments and the subjective sentiment analysis indicates that Twitter users mentioning APGA are less emotionally subjective in their tweets than the other parties.

Although researchers and practitioners are pushing the boundaries and enhancing the capacities of NLP tools and methods, works on African languages are lagging. A lot of focus on well resourced languages such as English, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Mandarin Chinese etc. Over 97% of the world's 7000 languages, including African languages, are low resourced for NLP i.e. they have little or no data, tools, and techniques for NLP research. For instance, only 5 out of 2965, 0.19% authors of full text papers in the ACL Anthology extracted from the 5 major conferences in 2018 ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLING and CoNLL, are affiliated to African institutions. In this work, we discuss our effort toward building a standard machine translation benchmark dataset for Igbo, one of the 3 major Nigerian languages. Igbo is spoken by more than 50 million people globally with over 50% of the speakers are in southeastern Nigeria. Igbo is low resourced although there have been some efforts toward developing IgboNLP such as part of speech tagging and diacritic restoration

Most languages, especially in Africa, have fewer or no established part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus. However, POS tagged corpus is essential for natural language processing (NLP) to support advanced researches such as machine translation, speech recognition, etc. Even in cases where there is no POS tagged corpus, there are some languages for which parallel texts are available online. The task of POS tagging a new language corpus with a new tagset usually face a bootstrapping problem at the initial stages of the annotation process. The unavailability of automatic taggers to help the human annotator makes the annotation process to appear infeasible to quickly produce adequate amounts of POS tagged corpus for advanced NLP research and training the taggers. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of a POS annotation method that employed the services of two automatic approaches to assist POS tagged corpus creation for a novel language in NLP. The two approaches are cross-lingual and monolingual POS tags projection. We used cross-lingual to automatically create an initial 'errorful' tagged corpus for a target language via word-alignment. The resources for creating this are derived from a source language rich in NLP resources. A monolingual method is applied to clean the induce noise via an alignment process and to transform the source language tags to the target language tags. We used English and Igbo as our case study. This is possible because there are parallel texts that exist between English and Igbo, and the source language English has available NLP resources. The results of the experiment show a steady improvement in accuracy and rate of tags transformation with score ranges of 6.13% to 83.79% and 8.67% to 98.37% respectively. The rate of tags transformation evaluates the rate at which source language tags are translated to target language tags.

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is a well-established technology for most Western European languages and a few other world languages, but it has not been evaluated on Igbo, an agglutinative African language. This article presents POS tagging experiments conducted using an Igbo corpus as a test bed for identifying the POS taggers and the Machine Learning (ML) methods that can achieve a good performance with the small dataset available for the language. Experiments have been conducted using different well-known POS taggers developed for English or European languages, and different training data styles and sizes. Igbo has a number of language-specific characteristics that present a challenge for effective POS tagging. One interesting case is the wide use of verbs (and nominalizations thereof) that have an inherent noun complement, which form “linked pairs” in the POS tagging scheme, but which may appear discontinuously. Another issue is Igbo’s highly productive agglutinative morphology, which can produce many variant word forms from a given root. This productivity is a key cause of the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words observed during Igbo tagging. We report results of experiments on a promising direction for improving tagging performance on such morphologically-inflected OOV words.

Image enhancement aims at improving the information content of original image for a specific purpose. This purpose could be for visual interpretation or for effective extraction of required details. Nevertheless, some acquired images are often associated with pixels of low dynamic range and as such result in low contrast images. Enhancing the contrast therefore tends to increase the dynamic range of the gray levels in the acquired image so as to span the full intensity range. Techniques such as Histogram Equalization (HE) and fuzzy technique can be adopted for contrast enhancement. HE adjusts the contrast of an input image by modifying the intensity distribution of its histogram. It is characterized by providing a global approach to image enhancement, computationally fast and easy to implement approach but can introduce unnatural artifacts and other undesirable elements to the resulting image. Fuzzy technique on its part enhances image by mapping the image gray level intensities into a fuzzy plane using membership functions; modifying the membership functions as desired and mapping back into the gray level plane. Thus, details at desired areas can be enhanced at the expense of increase in computational cost. This paper explores the effect of the use of HE and fuzzy technique to enhance low contrast images. Their performances are evaluated using the Mean squared error (MSE), Peak to signal noise ratio (PSNR), entropy and Absolute mean brightness error (AMBE).