Search results for: story text enhancer

Authors: Sahar Khedr, Dina Sayed, Ayman Hanafy

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Arabic is one of the most ancient and critical languages in the world. It has over than 250 million Arabic native speakers and more than twenty countries having Arabic as one of its official languages. In the past decade, we have witnessed a rapid evolution in smart devices, social network and technology sector which led to the need to provide tools and libraries that properly tackle the Arabic language in different domains. Stemming is one of the most crucial linguistic fundamentals. It is used in many applications especially in information extraction and text mining fields. The motivation behind this work is to enhance the Arabic light stemmer to serve the data mining industry and leverage it in an open source community. The presented implementation works on enhancing the Arabic light stemmer by utilizing and enhancing an algorithm that provides an extension for a new set of rules and patterns accompanied by adjusted procedure. This study has proven a significant enhancement for better search accuracy with an average 10% improvement in comparison with previous works.

Keywords: Arabic data mining, Arabic Information extraction, Arabic Light stemmer, Arabic stemmer

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Authors: H. E. Amolo

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The concepts of pollution or contamination and purification or ritual cleansing are very important concepts among traditional Africans. This is because in relation to human behaviors and attitudes, they constitute on the one hand what could be referred to as moral demands and on the other, what results in the default of such demands. The many taboos which a man has to observe are not to be regarded as things mechanical which do not touch the heart, but that the avoidance is a sacred law respected by the community. In breaking it, you offend the divine power’. Researches have shown that, Africans tenaciously hold the belief that, moral values are based upon the recognition of the divine will and that sin in the community must be expelled if perfect peace is to be enjoyed. Sadly enough, these moral values are gradually eroding in contemporary times. Thus, this study proposal calls for a survey of the passage from an African cultural context; how it can enhance the understanding of the text, as well as how it can complement its scholarly interpretation with the view of institutionalizing the concept of holiness as a means of bringing the people closer to God, and also instilling ethical purity and righteousness.

Keywords: cultural practices, Igbo ideology, purification, rituals

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Authors: Haojie Wang, Xun Li, Rui Yin

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In order to solve the memorization overfitting in the meta-learning MAML algorithm, a method of generating mutually exclusive tasks based on data augmentation is proposed. This method generates a mutex task by corresponding one feature of the data to multiple labels, so that the generated mutex task is inconsistent with the data distribution in the initial dataset. Because generating mutex tasks for all data will produce a large number of invalid data and, in the worst case, lead to exponential growth of computation, this paper also proposes a key data extraction method, that only extracts part of the data to generate the mutex task. The experiments show that the method of generating mutually exclusive tasks can effectively solve the memorization overfitting in the meta-learning MAML algorithm.

Keywords: data augmentation, mutex task generation, meta-learning, text classification.

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Authors: Eliziane Fernanda Navarro, Aparecida Eleonora Sitta

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Child of the Dark is the work of the Brazilian author Carolina Maria de Jesus, published at the first time by Ática and Francisco Alves in 1960. It is, mostly, a story of lack of rights. It lacks to men who live in the slums what is essential in order to take advantage of the privilege of rationality to develop themselves as civilized humans. It is, therefore, in the withholding of the basic rights that inequality finds space to build itself to be the main misery on Earth. Antonio Candido, a Brazilian sociologist claims that it is the right to literature has the ability to humanize men, once the aptitude to create fiction and fable is essential to the social balance. Hence, for the forming role that literature holds, it must be thought as the number of rights that assure human dignity, such as housing, education, health, freedom, etc. When talking about her routine, Carolina puts in evidence something that has great influence over the formation of human beings, contributing to the way they live: the slum. Even though it happens in a distinct way and using her own linguistics variation, Carolina writes about something that will only be discussed later on Brazil’s Cities Statute and Erminia Maricato: the right to the city, and how the slums are, although inserted in the city, an attachment, an illegal city, a dismissing room. It interests ourselves, for that matter, in this work, to analyse how the deprivation of the rights to the city and literature, detailed in Carolina’s journal, conditions human beings to a life where the instincts overcome the social values.

Keywords: Child of the Dark, slum, literature, architecture and urbanism, fundamental rights, Brazil

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Authors: Etsuo Morishita

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This paper presents the project and experiment-based fluid dynamics education in Meisei University, a private institution in Tokyo, Japan. We pay attention not only to the basic engineering courses but also to the practical aspect of engineering experience. So, we prepare courses called the Projects from I to VI. The Projects I and II are designed for the first year, III and IV are designated for the second year, V and VI are prepared for the third year, respectively. Each supervisor is responsible for two of these projects every year. When students take the Project V and VI at the third year, we automatically assume that these students will join the lab of the project for the graduation thesis. We would like to show our experience in the Project I in the summer term, 2016. In this project, we introduce a traction flight vehicle called Cat Flyer. This is a kind of a kite towed by a car for example. This is very similar to parasailing, but flight is possible even on the roads. Experiments in mechanical engineering education are also very important, and we would like to explain our course on centrifugal pump, venture, and orifice. Although these are described in detail in the text books of fluid dynamics, it is still crucial to have practical experiments as a student.

Keywords: aerodynamics, experiment, fluid dynamics, project

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Authors: Feng Shih-Jen, Chiang Yi-Hua, Yang Min-Chih

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After going through mass production and contract manufacturing phases, under the global consumption trend, Taiwan’s traditional industry has turned to creative design, research and development to gain recognition in the consumer market, build competitiveness in the global market and further promote the products from Taiwan’s traditional industry. Taichung City is rich in cultural creative resources, outperforming other counties/cities in originality, creative talents, cultural taste, art/culture participation and global marketing. As the result this has created a diversified and vibrant cultural market in Taichung, giving Taichung the highest potential as a cultural creative city. This research, through the project by Taichung Cultural Creative Industry Promotion Office, has built an exchange platform for the cultural creative industry in central Taiwan. The platform will promote exchanges of creative ideas in the cultural creative industry in Taiwan as well as industrial transformation and brings more value for the industry. This study also proposes the idea of “Taichung Cultural Creative Exhibition” Therefore, this study was conducted in Taiwan, Taichung 10 Creative Zone Exhibition, which is divided into four stages counseling. Respectively, of the first order: the cultural creative Zone specialty shops offer; The second stage is the industrial settlement discussions and counseling workshops in the ground; The third stage of consultation for the recruitment of the cultural creative businesses separate estate; The fourth stage is the story of the build cultural and creative industry. Hope through periodic counseling, handling Taichung 10 Creative Zone Exhibition.

Keywords: cultural creative industry, counseling, Taichung, Taiwan's creative zones

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Authors: Subodh Chandra Shakya, Rajendra Sapkota, Aakash Tamang, Shushant Pudasaini, Sujan Adhikari, Sajjan Adhikari

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Lots of efforts have been made in order to measure the semantic similarity between the text corpora in the documents. Techniques have been evolved to measure the similarity of two documents. One such state-of-art technique in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is word to vector models, which converts the words into their word-embedding and measures the similarity between the vectors. We found this to be quite useful for the task of resume ranking. So, this research paper is the implementation of the word2vec model along with other Natural Language Processing techniques in order to rank the resumes for the particular job description so as to automate the process of hiring. The research paper proposes the system and the findings that were made during the process of building the system.

Keywords: chunking, document similarity, information extraction, natural language processing, word2vec, word embedding

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Authors: Mahyar Maali, Merve Sagiroglu

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Steel, which is one of the base materials we prefer in the building construction, is the material with the highest ratio to weight of carrying capacity. Due to the carrying capacity, lighter and better quality steel in smaller sections and sizes has recently been used as a frame system in cold-formed steel structures. While light steel elements used as secondary frame elements during the past, they have nowadays started to be preferred as the main frame in low/middle story buildings and detached houses with advantages such as quick and easy installation, time-saving, and small amount of scrap. It is also economically ideal because the weight of structure is lighter than other steel profiles. Structural performances and failure modes of cold-formed structures are different from conventional ones due to their thin-walled structures. One of the most important elements of light steel structures to ensure stability is the connection. The screwed connections, which have self-drilling properties with special drilling tools, are widely used in the installation of cold-formed profiles. The length of the screw is selected according to the total thickness of the elements after the screw thickness is determined according to the elements of connections. The thickness of the material depends on the length of the drilling portion at the end of the screw. The shear tests of plates connected with self-drilling screws are carried out depending on the screw length, and their failure modes were evaluated in this study.

Keywords: cold-formed steel, screwed connection, connection, screw length

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Authors: Yanyue Yuan

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In this paper, the author shares the findings of a pilot study that examines students’ creative expressions and their perceptions of creativity when engaged in project-based learning. The study is based on an elective course that the author co-designed and co-taught with a colleague to sixteen grade six and seven students over the spring semester in 2019. Using the Little Prince story as the main prompt, they facilitated students’ original creation of a storytelling concert that integrated script writing, music production, lyrics, songs, and visual design as a result of both individual and collaborative work. The author will share the specific challenges we met during the project, including learning cultures of the school, class management, teachers' and parents’ attitude, process-oriented versus product-oriented mindset, and facilities and logistical resources. The findings of this pilot study will inform the ongoing research initiative of exploring how we can foster creative learning in public schools in the Chinese context. While K-12 schools of China’s public education system are still dominated by exam-oriented and teacher-centered approaches, the author proposes that expression-based learning can be a starting point for promoting students’ creativity and can serve as experimental efforts to initiate incremental changes within the current education framework. The paper will also touch upon insights gained from collaborations between university and K-12 schools.

Keywords: creativity, expression-based learning, K-12, incremental changes

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Authors: Simone Medio

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If we observe many modern cities from above, we are typically confronted with a sea of asphalt-clad flat rooftops. In contrast to the modernist expectation of a populated flat roof, flat rooftops in modern multi-story buildings are rarely used. On the contrary, they typify a desolate and abandoned landscape encouraging mechanical system allocation. Flat roof technology continues to be seen as a state-of-fact in most multi-storey building designs and its greening its prevalent environmental justification. This paper aims to seek a change in the approach to flat roofing. It makes a case for the opportunity at hand for architectonically resolute, sheltered, livable spaces that make a better use of the environment at rooftop level. The researcher is looking for the triggers that allow for that change to happen in the design process of case study buildings. The paper begins by exploring Han Slawick covered roof terrace in Amsterdam as a simple and essential example of transforming the flat roof in a usable, inhabitable space. It investigates the design challenges and the logistic, financial and legislative hurdles faced by the architect, and the outcomes in terms of building performance and occupant use and satisfaction. The researcher uses a grounded research methodology with direct interview process to the architect in charge of the building and the building user. Energy simulation tools and calculation of running costs are also used as further means of validating change.

Keywords: environmental design, flat rooftop persistence, roof re-habitation, tectonics

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Authors: David Ming Liu, Benjamin Hirsch, Bashir Aden

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Syndromic surveillance is to detect or predict disease outbreaks through the analysis of medical sources of data. Using social media data like tweets to do syndromic surveillance becomes more and more popular with the aid of open platform to collect data and the advantage of microblogging text and mobile geographic location features. In this paper, a Syndromic Surveillance Framework is presented with machine learning kernel using tweets data analytics. Influenza and the three cities Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and Dubai of United Arabic Emirates are used as the test disease and trial areas. Hospital cases data provided by the Health Authority of Abu Dhabi (HAAD) are used for the correlation purpose. In our model, Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) engine is adapted to do supervised learning classification and N-Fold cross validation confusion matrix are given as the simulation results with overall system recall 85.595% performance achieved.

Keywords: Syndromic surveillance, Tweets, Machine Learning, data mining, Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), Influenza

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Authors: Thassanant Unnanantn, Suttipong Boonphadung

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This research study aimed to survey and analyze the attitudes of pre-service teachers’ the analytical thinking development based on Miller’s Model. The informants of this study were 22 third year teacher students majoring in Thai. The course where the instruction was conducted was English for Academic Purposes in Thai Language 2. The instrument of this research was an open-ended questionnaire with two dimensions of questions: academic and satisfaction dimensions. The investigation revealed the positive attitudes. In the academic dimension, the majority of 12 (54.54%), the highest percentage, reflected that the method of teaching analytical thinking and language simultaneously was their new knowledge and the similar percentage also belonged to text cohesion in writing. For the satisfaction, the highest frequency count was from 17 of them (77.27%) and this majority favored the openness or friendliness of the teacher.

Keywords: analytical thinking development, Miller’s Model, attitudes, pre-service teachers

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Authors: Haojie Wang, Xun Li, Rui Yin

Abstract:

In order to solve the memorization overfitting in the model-agnostic meta-learning MAML algorithm, a method of generating mutually exclusive tasks based on data augmentation is proposed. This method generates a mutex task by corresponding one feature of the data to multiple labels so that the generated mutex task is inconsistent with the data distribution in the initial dataset. Because generating mutex tasks for all data will produce a large number of invalid data and, in the worst case, lead to an exponential growth of computation, this paper also proposes a key data extraction method that only extract part of the data to generate the mutex task. The experiments show that the method of generating mutually exclusive tasks can effectively solve the memorization overfitting in the meta-learning MAML algorithm.

Keywords: mutex task generation, data augmentation, meta-learning, text classification.

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Authors: Murat Zencirkiran, Nilufer Seyidoglu Akdeniz, Elvan Ender Altay, Zeynep Pirselimoglu Batman

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Monumental trees make an important contribution to the cultural interaction between societies. At the same time, monument trees, which are considered as symbols of some beliefs, are living beings that are transmitted from generation to generation. Mystical, folkloric and dimensional aspects of our cultural heritage and the link between the past and present, the memorial trees of the generations of the stories conveyed the story of the legends at the same time with the aesthetic features of the objects attract attention. There are many monumental trees that witness historical processes in Bursa, which is a land of very different cultures from the Prusias (BC 232-192). Within this scope, monumental trees located within the boundaries of Bursa province and their contribution to urban culture were evaluated. Monument plane trees recorded in Bursa and its districts were determined by the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, the Governorship of Bursa, the Provincial Directorate of Environment and Urbanism, the Directorate of Protection of Natural Assets, and these trees were examined in situ. As a result of the inspections made, the monument trees living today are classified according to their species. Within the scope of the study, it was determined that there were 1001 monumental tree species in different species within the boundaries of Bursa province. 71.83% of the recorded species were Platanus species and 11.79% were Pinus species. On the other hand, the stories about the contribution of cultural landscapes to the examples of living or now-disappearing examples of Bursa history from these monumental trees have been compiled and presented in the study.

Keywords: Bursa, cultural landscape, landscape, monumental trees

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Authors: Vahidreza Mahmoudabadi, Omid Bahar, Mohammad Kazem Jafari

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In many applied engineering problems, structural analysis is usually conducted by assuming a rigid bed, while imposing the effect of structure bed flexibility can affect significantly on the structure response. This article focuses on investigation and evaluation of the effects arising from considering a soil-structure system in evaluation of dynamic characteristics of a steel structure with respect to elastic and inelastic behaviors. The recorded structure acceleration during Taiwan’s strong Chi-Chi earthquake on different floors of the structure was our evaluation criteria. The respective structure is an eight-story steel bending frame structure designed using a displacement-based direct method assuring weak beam - strong column function. The results indicated that different identification methods i.e. reverse Fourier transform or transfer functions, is capable to determine some of the dynamic parameters of the structure precisely, rather than evaluating all of them at once (mode frequencies, mode shapes, structure damping, structure rigidity, etc.). Response evaluation based on the input and output data elucidated that the structure first mode is not significantly affected, even considering the soil-structure interaction effect, but the upper modes have been changed. Also, it was found that the response transfer function of the different stories, in which plastic hinges have occurred in the structure components, provides similar results.

Keywords: bending steel frame structure, dynamic characteristics, displacement-based design, soil-structure system, system identification

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Authors: Shahin Zanbaghi, Saeed Samet

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The internet has transformed the way we shop. Previously, most of our purchases came in the form of shopping trips to a nearby store. Now, it’s as easy as clicking a mouse. But with great convenience comes great responsibility. We have to be constantly vigilant about our personal information. In this work, our proposed approach is to encrypt the information printed on the physical packages, which include personal information in plain text, using a symmetric encryption algorithm; then, we store that encrypted information into a Blockchain network rather than storing them in companies or corporations centralized databases. We present, implement and assess a blockchain-based system using Ethereum smart contracts. We present detailed algorithms that explain the details of our smart contract. We present the security, cost, and performance analysis of the proposed method. Our work indicates that the proposed solution is economically attainable and provides data integrity, security, transparency, and data traceability.

Keywords: blockchain, Ethereum, smart contract, commit-reveal scheme

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Authors: Sannikumar Patel, Brian Nolan, Markus Hofmann, Philip Owende, Kunjan Patel

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Sentiment analysis and opinion mining have become emerging topics of research in recent years but most of the work is focused on data in the English language. A comprehensive research and analysis are essential which considers multiple languages, machine translation techniques, and different classifiers. This paper presents, a comparative analysis of different approaches for multilingual sentiment analysis. These approaches are divided into two parts: one using classification of text without language translation and second using the translation of testing data to a target language, such as English, before classification. The presented research and results are useful for understanding whether machine translation should be used for multilingual sentiment analysis or building language specific sentiment classification systems is a better approach. The effects of language translation techniques, features, and accuracy of various classifiers for multilingual sentiment analysis is also discussed in this study.

Keywords: cross-language analysis, machine learning, machine translation, sentiment analysis

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Authors: Tingting Zhou

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The partial privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is a dynamic process. The main features of this process lie in not only gradual and sequential privatizations, but also privatized shares transfer. For partially privatized SOEs, the introduction of private sector ownership is not the end of the story because the previously introduced private owners may choose to leave the SOEs by transferring the privatized shares after privatization, a process that is called “privatized shares transfer”. This paper investigates the determinants of privatized shares transfer from the perspective of large shareholders’ control rights. The results captures the fact that the higher control rights of large shareholders lead to more privatized shares transfer. After exploring the impacts of excessive control rights, the results provide evidence supporting the idea that firms with excessive numbers of directors, senior managers or supervisors who also have positions in the largest controlling shareholder’s entity are more likely to transfer privatized shares owned by private owners. In addition, the largest shareholders’ ownership also plays a role in privatized shares transfer. This evidence suggests that the large shareholders’ control rights should be limited to an appropriate range during the process of privatization, thereby giving private shareholders more opportunity to participate in the operation of firms, strengthen the state and enhance the competitiveness of state capital.

Keywords: control rights of large shareholders, partial privatization, privatized shares transfer, state-owned listed companies

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Authors: Brynn Patrice Fader

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The objective of this research project is to assess the ways in which Jean-Francois Menards French translation Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers translates the cultural references from the original text JK Rowlings' Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. The method of this analysis is to focus on analyzing the reasons for and the ways in which Menard translates the spells and catchphrases throughout the novel and the effects that these choices have on the reader. While at times Menard resorts to the omission or manipulation and borrowing he also contrasts these techniques by transferring the cultural references using the direct translational approach. It appears that the translator resorts to techniques other than direct translation when it is necessary to ensure that the target audience will understand the events and conversations taking place.

Keywords: cultural elements, direct translation, manipulation, omission

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Authors: Swarnadip Ghosh

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Sentiment Analysis is the process of detecting the contextual polarity of text. In other words, it determines whether a piece of writing is positive, negative or neutral.Sentiment analysis of documents holds great importance in today's world, when numerous information is stored in databases and in the world wide web. An efficient algorithm to illicit such information, would be beneficial for social, economic as well as medical purposes. In this project, we have developed an algorithm to classify a document into positive or negative. Using our algorithm, we obtained a feature set from the data, and classified the documents based on this feature set. It is important to note that, in the classification, we have not used the independence assumption, which is considered by many procedures like the Naive Bayes. This makes the algorithm more general in scope. Moreover, because of the sparsity and high dimensionality of such data, we did not use empirical distribution for estimation, but developed a method by finding degree of close clustering of the data points. We have applied our algorithm on a movie review data set obtained from IMDb and obtained satisfactory results.

Keywords: sentiment, Run's Test, cross validation, higher dimensional pmf estimation

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Authors: Sadia Nasrin Tisha, Mushfika Sharmin Rahman, Javier Orduz

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Machine learning is applied in a variety of fields throughout the world. The healthcare sector has benefited enormously from it. One of the most effective approaches for predicting human heart diseases is to use machine learning applications to classify data and predict the outcome as a classification. However, with the rapid advancement of quantum technology, quantum computing has emerged as a potential game-changer for many applications. Quantum algorithms have the potential to execute substantially faster than their classical equivalents, which can lead to significant improvements in computational performance and efficiency. In this study, we applied quantum machine learning concepts to predict coronary heart diseases from text data. We experimented thrice with three different features; and three feature sets. The data set consisted of 100 data points. We pursue to do a comparative analysis of the two approaches, highlighting the potential benefits of quantum machine learning for predicting heart diseases.

Keywords: quantum machine learning, SVM, QSVM, matrix product state

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Authors: Aula Khatteb Abu-Liel

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The study investigated the effects of diglossia and orthography on reading in Arabic, manipulating reading in Spoken Arabic (SA), using Arabizi, in which it is written using Latin letters on computers/phones, and the two forms of the conventional written form Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): vowelled (shallow) and unvowelled (deep). 77 skilled readers in 8th grade performed oral reading of single words and narrative and expository texts, and silent reading comprehension of both genres of text. Oral reading and comprehension revealed different patterns. Single words and texts were read faster and more accurately in unvoweled MSA, slowest and least accurately in vowelled MSA, and in-between in Arabizi. Comprehension was highest for vowelled MSA. Narrative texts were better than expository texts in Arabizi with the opposite pattern in MSA. The results suggest that frequency of the type of texts and the way in which phonology is encoded affect skilled reading.

Keywords: Arabic, Arabize, computer mediated communication, diglossia, modern standard Arabic

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Authors: Mihai Duguleana, Florin Girbacia, Cristian Postelnicu, Raffaello Brodi, Marcello Carrozzino

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Augmented Reality (AR) has taken a big leap with the introduction of mobile applications which co-locate bi-dimensional (e.g. photo, video, text) and tridimensional information with the location of the user enriching his/her experience. This study presents the advantages of using Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) technologies in traveling applications, improving cultural heritage exploration. We propose a location-based AR application which combines co-location with the augmented visual information about Pisa monuments to establish a friendly navigation in this historic city. AR was used to render contextual visual information in the outdoor environment. The developed Android-based application offers two different options: it provides the ability to identify the monuments positioned close to the user’s position and it offers location information for getting near the key touristic objectives. We present the process of creating the monuments’ 3D map database and the navigation algorithm.

Keywords: augmented reality, electronic compass, GPS, location-based service

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Authors: T. G. Asmitha Chandini

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Web-based image search re-ranking, as an successful method to get better the results. In a query keyword, the first stair is store the images is first retrieve based on the text-based information. The user to select a query keywordimage, by using this query keyword other images are re-ranked based on their visual properties with images.Now a day to day, people projected to match images in a semantic space which is used attributes or reference classes closely related to the basis of semantic image. though, understanding a worldwide visual semantic space to demonstrate highly different images from the web is difficult and inefficient. The re-ranking images, which automatically offline part learns dissimilar semantic spaces for different query keywords. The features of images are projected into their related semantic spaces to get particular images. At the online stage, images are re-ranked by compare their semantic signatures obtained the semantic précised by the query keyword image. The query-specific semantic signatures extensively improve both the proper and efficiency of image re-ranking.

Keywords: Query, keyword, image, re-ranking, semantic, signature

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Authors: Zahra Yaghoubi

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One of the initial occurrences that, according to observations of those who have temporarily experienced death, arises is encountering beings or individuals possessing supernatural powers. For some, these beings are described as beautiful and radiant, while for others, they are portrayed as dark and terrifying. In some experiences, they are mentioned as young and beautiful individuals. Islamic religious sources refer to these beings as angels or celestial beings assigned by God to take and collect human souls. This research, conducted through library methods, examines and justifies the initial stage of observations from an Islamic perspective based on first and second-hand religious sources. It relies on evidence, observations, and oral narratives of near-death experiencers, as well as interviews published in television programs. The goal is to investigate Islamic sources and validate the presence of angels in near-death experiences. The use of visual interview reports direct reliance on the narrative rather than the written text by someone other than the experiencer, is among the main criteria for enhancing transparency and authenticity in conveying the individual's experiences.

Keywords: angel, angels of death, Islamic sources, near-death experiences, death, soul

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Authors: F. L. Bernardo, R. A. S. Zacarias

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The ways to translate are manifold since textual genres undergoing translations are diverse. In this essay, our goal is to give special attention to the literary genre and to the online translation tool Google Translate (GT), widely used either by nonprofessionals or by scholars, in order to show evidence of the indispensability of human wit in a good translation. Our study has its basis on a literary review of prominent authors, with emphasis on translation categories. Also highlighting the issue of polysemous literary translation, we aim to shed light on the translator’s craft and the fallible nature of online translation. To better illustrate these principles, the methodology consisted on performing a comparative analysis involving the original text Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe in English to its online translation given by GT and to a translation into Brazilian Portuguese performed by a human. We proceeded to identifying and analyzing the degrees of textual equivalence according to the following categories: volume, levels and order. The results have attested the unsuitability in a translation done by a computer connected to the World Wide Web.

Keywords: Google Translator, human translation, literary translation, Moll Flanders

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Authors: Isaiah Ifeanyichukwu Agbo

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Human speech is capable of serving many purposes. Power and control are not always exercised overtly by linguistic acts, but maybe enacted and exercised in the myriad of taken-for-granted actions of everyday life. Domination, power control, discrimination and mind control exist in human speech and may lead to asymmetrical power relations. In discourse, there are persuasive and manipulative linguistic acts that serve to establish solidarity and identification with the 'we group' and polarize with the 'they group'. Political discourse is crafted to defend and promote the problematic narrative of outright controversial events in a nation’s history thereby sustaining domination, marginalization, manipulation, inequalities and injustices, often without the dominated and marginalized group being aware of them. They are designed and positioned to serve the political and social needs of the producers. Political crisis speeches in Nigeria, just like in other countries concentrate on positive self-image, de-legitimization of political opponents, reframing accusation to one’s advantage, redefining problematic terms and adopting reversal strategy. In most cases, the people are ignorant of the hidden ideological positions encoded in the text. Few researches have been conducted adopting the frameworks of critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics to investigate this situation in the political crisis speeches in Nigeria. In this paper, we focus attention on the analyses of the linguistic, semantic, and ideological elements in selected political crisis speeches in Nigeria to investigate if they create and sustain unequal power relations and manipulative tendencies from the perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Critical Discourse Analysis unpacks both opaque and transparent structural relationships of power dominance, power relations and control as manifested in language. Critical discourse analysis emerged from a critical theory of language study which sees the use of language as a form of social practice where social relations are reproduced or contested and different interests are served. Systemic function linguistics relates the structure of texts to their function. Fairclough’s model of CDA and Halliday’s systemic functional approach to language study are adopted in this paper. This paper probes into language use that perpetuates inequalities. This study demystifies the hidden implicature of the selected political crisis speeches and reveals the existence of information that is not made explicit in what the political actors actually say. The analysis further reveals the ideological configurations present in the texts. These ideological standpoints are the basis for naturalizing implicit ideologies and hegemonic influence in the texts. The analyses of the texts further uncovered the linguistic and discursive strategies deployed by text producers to manipulate the unsuspecting members of the public both mentally and conceptually in order to enact, sustain and maintain unhealthy power relations at crisis times in the Nigerian political history.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, language, political crisis, power relations, systemic functional linguistics

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Authors: Prince Dacosta Aboagye, Ayyoob Sharifi

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Cities respond to climate concerns mainly through their climate action plans (CAPs). A comprehensive content analysis of the dynamics in existing urban CAPs is not well represented in the literature. This literature void presents a difficulty in appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of urban CAPs. Here, we perform a qualitative content analysis (QCA) on CAPs from 278 cities worldwide and use text-mining tools to map and visualize the relevant data. Our analysis showed a decline in the number of CAPs developed and published following the global COVID-19 lockdown period. Evidently, megacities are leading the deep decarbonisation agenda. We also observed a transition from developing mainly mitigation-focused CAPs pre-COP21 to both mitigation and adaptation CAPs. A lack of inclusiveness in local climate planning was common among European and North American cities. The evidence is a catalyst for understanding the trends in existing urban CAPs to shape future urban climate planning.

Keywords: urban, climate action plans, strengths, weaknesses

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Authors: Haji Ali Haji, Hussein Suleman, Ulrike Rivett

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This paper presents the design, development and evaluation of an application prototype developed to support tuberculosis (TB) patients’ treatment adherence. The system makes use of graphics and voice reminders as opposed to text messaging to encourage patients to follow their medication routine. To evaluate the effect of the prototype applications, participants were given mobile phones on which the reminder system was installed. Thirty-eight people, including TB health workers and patients from Zanzibar, Tanzania, participated in the evaluation exercises. The results indicate that the participants found the mobile graphic-based application is useful to support TB treatment. All participants understood and interpreted the intended meaning of every image correctly. The study findings revealed that the use of a mobile visual-based application may have potential benefit to support TB patients (both literate and illiterate) in their treatment processes.

Keywords: ICT4D, mobile technology, tuberculosis, visual-based reminder

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Authors: Mona Alzahrani

Abstract:

Microworld theories can help to define the many influences on female development. In this research, theories together with narratives have been used to discover the reality of children’s gender perceptions in Saudi Arabia. Today, Saudi Arabia is considered a ‘closed and conserved’ society due to tribal, cultural and religious factors. This study focuses on how young girls in Saudi Arabia learn about what is expected of them as females. Cultural beliefs and experiences contribute to children’s notions of identity. Moreover, significant others such as more experienced peers, teachers, parents, and other members of a society can influence a child’s development of knowledge through interactions within their social world. There are dominant influences from the Saudi State. These influences have very strong devices and perceptions of what or how a female should act and be. However, children may have other viewpoints, as it also needs to be considered that the Internet and other media sources could have an influence. Consequently, difficulties could exist for these young children to feel an authentic sense of belonging. The study gathered data using a multi-method approach that elicited the perspectives of the children using ‘multiple modes of expression’ such as observations, story-telling, picture prompt cards, group interviews, drawings and annotations. For this study, prompts and a book was devised, specifically, for use in a Saudi setting. It was found that Saudi young girls in preschool were heteronomous, mainly influenced by culture and society, in their perceptions of female gender and role.

Keywords: Saudi Arabia, pre-school, female, teachers, gender, identity, role

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