The political geography of a Palestinian state: Main problems of implementation

This study examined the main territorial, political, and economic obstacles facing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The study tried to determine if the classical requirements of state formation can be met within the geographic and political context of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. To accomplish this, the study focused on the main obstacles and problems associated with the following: The territorial definition and delimitation of a Palestinian state The determination of Palestinian citizenship and political representation. The establishment of a viable and independent Palestinian economy. The specification and execution of the functions and responsibilities of a Palestinian state apparatus. To provide a context for studying the political geography of a Palestinian state, the principal geographic and political literature on the state as a politically organized area was reviewed and summarized. The summary included general description of the concepts of state sovereignty and factors influencing it, political borders, nation and nationalism, state form, state functions, and state apparatus. Two theories of state formation were also included to provide a comparative framework for examining the Palestinian case. The 1993 PLO-Israeli Declaration of Principals (DOP) on Palestinian interim self-government arrangements is considered a major qualitative development in the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This thesis, thus, used the DOP and the subsequent Cairo Agreement between the PLO and Israel as the starting point for the analysis. The potential effects of the DOP and the Cairo Agreement on the process of Palestinian state formation was examined. A detailed textual analysis of the two agreements revealed their insufficiency for addressing the main obstacles outlined by the thesis. The way in which these problems are addressed will ultimately determine the geopolitical outcome of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. By identifying and classifying these problems and obstacles this thesis provides a context for evaluating the feasibility of creating a Palestinian state. For a truly independent Palestinian state to form, the PLO-Israeli peace process must produce an adequate resolution to the various problems outlined in this thesis. Any future Palestinian political entity that falls short of meeting all the essential requirements of a state cannot be considered as such

English speakers' common orthographic errors in Arabic as L2 writing system : an analytical case study

PhD ThesisThe research involving Arabic Writing System (WS) is quite limited. Yet, researching writing errors of L2WS Arabic against a certain L1WS seems to be relatively neglected. This study attempts to identify, describe, and explain common orthographic errors in Arabic writing amongst English-speaking learners. First, it outlines the Arabic Writing System’s (AWS) characteristics and available empirical studies of L2WS Arabic. This study embraced the Error Analysis approach, utilising a mixed-method design that deployed quantitative and qualitative tools (writing tests, questionnaire, and interview). The data were collected from several institutions around the UK, which collectively accounted for 82 questionnaire responses, 120 different writing samples from 44 intermediate learners, and six teacher interviews. The hypotheses for this research were; a) English-speaking learners of Arabic make common orthographic errors similar to those of Arabic native speakers; b) English-speaking learners share several common orthographic errors with other learners of Arabic as a second/foreign language (AFL); and c) English-speaking learners of Arabic produce their own common orthographic errors which are specifically related to the differences between the two WSs. The results confirmed all three hypotheses. Specifically, English-speaking learners of L2WS Arabic commonly made six error types: letter ductus (letter shape), orthography (spelling), phonology, letter dots, allographemes (i.e. letterform), and direction. Gemination and L1WS transfer error rates were not found to be major. Another important result showed that five letter groups in addition to two letters are particularly challenging to English-speaking learners. Study results indicated that error causes were likely to be from one of four factors: script confusion, orthographic difficulties, phonological realisation, and teaching/learning strategies. These results are generalizable as the data were collected from several institutions in different parts of the UK. Suggestions and implications as well as recommendations for further research are outlined accordingly in the conclusion chapter

Special Libraries, December 1961

Volume 52, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1961/1009/thumbnail.jp

Improving Search via Named Entity Recognition in Morphologically Rich Languages – A Case Study in Urdu

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. February 2018. Major: Computer Science. Advisors: Vipin Kumar, Blake Howald. 1 computer file (PDF); xi, 236 pages.Search is not a solved problem even in the world of Google and Bing's state of the art engines. Google and similar search engines are keyword based. Keyword-based searching suffers from the vocabulary mismatch problem -- the terms in document and user's information request don't overlap. For example, cars and automobiles. This phenomenon is called synonymy. Similarly, the user's term may be polysemous -- a user is inquiring about a river's bank, but documents about financial institutions are matched. Vocabulary mismatch exacerbated when the search occurs in Morphological Rich Language (MRL). Concept search techniques like dimensionality reduction do not improve search in Morphological Rich Languages. Names frequently occur news text and determine the "what," "where," "when," and "who" in the news text. Named Entity Recognition attempts to recognize names automatically in text, but these techniques are far from mature in MRL, especially in Arabic Script languages. Urdu is one the focus MRL of this dissertation among Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, and Russian, but it does not have the enabling technologies for NER and search. A corpus, stop word generation algorithm, a light stemmer, a baseline, and NER algorithm is created so the NER-aware search can be accomplished for Urdu. This dissertation demonstrates that NER-aware search on Arabic, Russian, Urdu, and English shows significant improvement over baseline. Furthermore, this dissertation highlights the challenges for researching in low-resource MRL languages