FOREWORD

Abstract

By the grace of Allah, it is a great pleasure to introduce this issue of: The International Journal on Islamic Applications in Computer Science and Technology The success and the welcome of this Journal by researchers from many countries gave us great encouragement for continuing issuing in the due time. This Journal is aimed at publishing original research papers in the field of Islamic Applications in computer science and technology. This field is catching a momentum in the recent years. As a Journal interested in this field, it is the first International Journal of its specific field. As research is growing in this field, we hope that this Journal will be a platform for researchers working in the field to publish their research. This issue contains four papers. The first one is entitled: Challenges in the Islamic Question Answering Corpora In the past, researchers in Islamic question-answering systems created their datasets to evaluate their systems due to the lack of the dataset, making it difficult to compare the performance of the systems. In this research, an attempt to review and explore the Islamic questions and answers datasets, study the percentage of its coverage of the Quran or Hadith, evaluate them using thirteen criteria, and identify their weaknesses which could serve as a basis for future research. We concluded that there is a limited number of Quran questions, and their answers are available in Arabic only. The second paper is entitled: A game-based learning Quran reading application: A performance evaluation of the Special Needs Children Understanding the core difficulties and challenges of different types of special needs children during language e-learning would facilitate the process of designing personalized learning methods via computer applications. To support this theory, a desktop-based application incorporating an adaptable method like gamification with multiple modules and analyzed the accuracy and time attributes from the collected actual target group’s data is developed. The proposed application could identify where the students frequently make mistakes while learning using the application. It is also observed that most of the students quickly embraced the proposed game-modules resulting in a positive effect in their Arabic language learning. The third paper is entitled: Detecting Arabic Fake News on Social Media using Sarcasm and Hate Speech in Comments It is hypothesized that the existence of sarcasm or hate language in the comments and responses to a news post may be used as an indicator of the authenticity of the post itself. Therefore, this paper proposes a new technique incorporating hate language and sarcasm detected in users' comments as significant features for identifying fake news. We used three Arabic datasets to conduct this study and experimented with various state-of-the-art models. As a result, it is concluded that considering these features in news responses can help detect fake news since it is found that the existence of sarcasm or hate speech in comments of false tweets is approximately double that in true ones. The fourth paper is: Awareness Level of the Cyber Security and Ethics at Students in University of Ha’il This paper deepens into a serious problem in cyber security, which is measuring the awareness level of people about cyber security and its related topics. It adapts a quantitative method by conducting a questionnaire which is adapted and built based on literature review of several papers and resources, and it is aimed to a specific category which is the Ha’il university’s students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Then, there is another qualitative method used to understand the point of view of some specialist in security, and to gain benefits from the experiences to address the problem properly. At the end, this research provides steps to raise the knowledge of the society about the cyber security field; also, it is recommended to design an educational brochure which has the basic information and guidance for people who are not specialized in computer science, in order to make them more aware and careful with the internet world.