A Lightweight Vision-Language Fusion Framework for Predicting App Ratings from User Interfaces and Metadata

App ratings are among the most significant indicators of the quality, usability, and overall user satisfaction of mobile applications. However, existing app rating prediction models are largely limited to textual data or user interface (UI) features, overlooking the importance of jointly leveraging UI and semantic information. To address these limitations, this study proposes a lightweight vision--language framework that integrates both mobile UI and semantic information for app rating prediction. The framework combines MobileNetV3 to extract visual features from UI layouts and DistilBERT to extract textual features. These multimodal features are fused through a gated fusion module with Swish activations, followed by a multilayer perceptron (MLP) regression head. The proposed model is evaluated using mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), mean squared error (MSE), coefficient of determination (R2), and Pearson correlation. After training for 20 epochs, the model achieves an MAE of 0.1060, an RMSE of 0.1433, an MSE of 0.0205, an R2 of 0.8529, and a Pearson correlation of 0.9251. Extensive ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of different combinations of visual and textual encoders. Overall, the proposed lightweight framework provides valuable insights for developers and end users, supports sustainable app development, and enables efficient deployment on edge devices.

Explicit Grammar Semantic Feature Fusion for Robust Text Classification

Natural Language Processing enables computers to understand human language by analysing and classifying text efficiently with deep-level grammatical and semantic features. Existing models capture features by learning from large corpora with transformer models, which are computationally intensive and unsuitable for resource-constrained environments. Therefore, our proposed study incorporates comprehensive grammatical rules alongside semantic information to build a robust, lightweight classification model without resorting to full parameterised transformer models or heavy deep learning architectures. The novelty of our approach lies in its explicit encoding of sentence-level grammatical structure, including syntactic composition, phrase patterns, and complexity indicators, into a compact grammar vector, which is then fused with frozen contextual embeddings. These heterogeneous elements unified a single representation that captures both the structural and semantic characteristics of the text. Deep learning models such as Deep Belief Networks (DBNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs), BiLSTMs, and transformer-based BERT and XLNET were used to train and evaluate the model, with the number of epochs varied. Based on experimental results, the unified feature representation model captures both the semantic and structural properties of text, outperforming baseline models by 2%-15%, enabling more effective learning across heterogeneous domains. Unlike prior syntax-aware transformer models that inject grammatical structure through additional attention layers, tree encoders, or full fine-tuning, the proposed framework treats grammar as an explicit inductive bias rather than a learnable module, resulting in a very lightweight model that delivers better performance on edge devices

Entity-Aware and Secure Query Optimization in Database Using Named Entity Recognition

Cloud storage has become the backbone of modern data infrastructure, yet privacy and efficient data retrieval remain significant challenges. Traditional privacy-preserving approaches primarily focus on enhancing database security but fail to address the automatic identification of sensitive information before encryption. This can dramatically reduce query processing time and mitigate errors during manual identification of sensitive information, thereby reducing potential privacy risks. To address this limitation, this research proposes an intelligent privacy-preserving query optimization framework that integrates Named Entity Recognition (NER) to detect sensitive information in queries, utilizing secure data encryption and query optimization techniques for both sensitive and non-sensitive data in parallel, thereby enabling efficient database optimization. Combined deep learning algorithms and transformer-based models to detect and classify sensitive entities with high precision, and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm to encrypt, with blind indexing to secure search functionality of the sensitive data, whereas non-sensitive data was divided into groups using the K-means algorithm, along with a rank search for optimization. Among all NER models, the Deep Belief Network combined with Long Short-Term Memory (DBN-LSTM) delivers the best performance, with an accuracy of 93% and precision (94%), recall, and F1 score of 93%, and 93%, respectively. Besides, encrypted search achieved considerably faster results with the help of blind indexing, and non-sensitive data fetching also outperformed traditional clustering-based searches. By integrating sensitive data detection, encryption, and query optimization, this work advances the state of privacy-preserving computation in modern cloud infrastructures.