A customized deep learning-based framework for classification and analysis of social media posts to enhance the Hajj and Umrah services

Abstract

Each year, millions of pilgrims come to Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj and Umrah. To help pilgrims with their difficulties and make plans to enhance the Hajj and Umrah services, this article offers a deep learning-based framework to categorize and analyze pilgrims’ posts on social media networks X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Instagram. We extracted Arabic posts related to Hajj/Umrah then tokenized and pre-processed the dataset to remove unnecessary parts such as punctuation. Posts are manually labeled into five classes: Health, Organization, Security, Services, and Worship. Labeled posts are collected to build a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network classifier for deep learning. To increase the prediction accuracy, we customized the LSTM classification layer and used the sum of squares error (SSE) loss function instead of the default cross-entropy loss function. A rigorous simulation is run to assess the system’s effectiveness. Every time a simulation round occurs, the trained network is tasked with identifying the classes of unlabeled posts (testing data). Similar tests are performed using the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) algorithms for comparative analysis. Accuracy, confusion matrix, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1 score are used to quantify the system performance. The maximum mean accuracy of the proposed framework, KNN and LDA are 85.65%, 68.47%, and 59.06% respectively. The proposed framework needs to be integrated into a larger system called the Intelligent Pilgrim Service System (IPSS). We described the IPSS architecture, which comprises modules for data generation, data storage (on the cloud), and a control center. We described a hashtag mechanism as a part of the IPSS. This hashtag mechanism will provide both general and focused advice to millions of pilgrims related to their social media posts. We discussed scenarios of how the IPSS can enhance the Hajj and Umrah services.