Parallel corpus multi stream question answering with applications to the Qu'ran

Question-Answering (QA) is an important research area, which is concerned with developing an automated process that answers questions posed by humans in a natural language. QA is a shared task for the Information Retrieval (IR), Information Extraction (IE), and Natural Language Processing communities (NLP). A technical review of different QA system models and methodologies reveals that a typical QA system consists of different components to accept a natural language question from a user and deliver its answer(s) back to the user. Existing systems have been usually aimed at structured/ unstructured data collected from everyday English text, i.e. text collected from television programmes, news wires, conversations, novels and other similar genres. Despite all up-to-date research in the subject area, a notable fact is that none of the existing QA Systems has been tested on a Parallel Corpus of religious text with the aim of question answering. Religious text has peculiar characteristics and features which make it more challenging for traditional QA methods than other kinds of text. This thesis proposes PARMS (Parallel Corpus Multi Stream) Methodology; a novel method applying existing advanced IR (Information Retrieval) techniques, and combining them with NLP (Natural Language Processing) methods and additional semantic knowledge to implement QA (Question Answering) for a parallel corpus. A parallel Corpus involves use of multiple forms of the same corpus where each form differs from others in a certain aspect, e.g. translations of a scripture from one language to another by different translators. Additional semantic knowledge can be referred as a stream of information related to a corpus. PARMS uses Multiple Streams of semantic knowledge including a general ontology (WordNet) and domain-specific ontologies (QurTerms, QurAna, QurSim). This additional knowledge has been used in embedded form for Query Expansion, Corpus Enrichment and Answer Ranking. The PARMS Methodology has wider applications. This thesis applies it to the Quran – the core text of Islam; as a first case study. The PARMS Method uses parallel corpus comprising ten different English translations of the Quran. An individual Quranic verse is treated as an answer to questions asked in a natural language, English. This thesis also implements PARMS QA Application as a proof of concept for the PARMS methodology. The PARMS Methodology aims to evaluate the range of semantic knowledge streams separately and in combination; and also to evaluate alternative subsets of the DATA source: QA from one stream vs. parallel corpus. Results show that use of Parallel Corpus and Multiple Streams of semantic knowledge have obvious advantages. To the best of my knowledge, this method is developed for the first time and it is expected to be a benchmark for further research area

Designing the interface between research, learning and teaching.

Abstract: This paper’s central argument is that teaching and research need to be reshaped so that they connect in a productive way. This will require actions at a whole range of levels, from the individual teacher to the national system and include the international communities of design scholars. To do this, we need to start at the level of the individual teacher and course team. This paper cites some examples of strategies that focus on what students do as learners and how teachers teach and design courses to enhance research-led teaching. The paper commences with an examination of the departmental context of (art and) design education. This is followed by an exploration of what is understood by research-led teaching and a further discussion of the dimensions of research-led teaching. It questions whether these dimensions are evident, and if so to what degree in design departments, programmes and courses. The discussion examines the features of research-led departments and asks if a department is not research-led in its approach to teaching, why it should consider changing strategies

Trajectories of Belonging: Literacies and Intersectionality in the Mobile Phone and Home Building Practices of Syrian Refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

This dissertation responds to Syrian nationals’ stories of displacement and settlement. Within these accounts, people contend with forced migration through language, personal networks, and technology. A sociomaterial theory of literacy recognizes the way in which these interviewees sought safety and belonging while accessing concrete systems in order to achieve material effects such as mobility and shelter. This dissertation’s case studies pertaining to mobile devices and refugee homes contribute to an infrastructural understanding of literacies as semiotic, social, affective, and material practices bearing an affordant and epistemically generative relation to physical infrastructures. The project’s interviewees used 2G communication infrastructures while travelling from Syria to Iraq and generated political readings of the powerful actors curating these infrastructures. These literate practices were motivated by dynamic emotional investments, which I read through the concept of belonging, a process of felt affiliation to people, places, and identities. By viewing belonging in terms of trajectories, I aim to suggest the rise and fall of emotional connection amid processual time and shifts in location. Expressions of belonging revealed that the overwhelming majority of the project’s interview participants identify as Kurds, and that they anticipated feeling at home in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). They were generally welcomed, yet a combination of factors tended to introduce vicissitudes into this feeling of belonging, including tensions between the refugee and host communities. The interviews gathered here suggest that many Kurdish-identifying interviewees experienced nuanced intersectional vulnerabilities co-constituted not only by Kurdish identity but also by language and dialect, social class, gender expression, Syrian origin, and documentary status. Situated intersectionality offers a framework for engaging non-Western categories of belonging and a social justice-oriented logic for articulating historical and political contexts with qualitative findings. Most importantly, it leads here to the disruption of mono-categorical claims about the community under discussion, including the Turkish state’s frequent justification of military aggression in the region through the reduction of all Kurds to the figure of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist. In this way, this dissertation cultivates an orientation of transnational solidarity with the Kurdish-identifying Syrian asylum seekers living in the KRI

A critical reflexive politics of location, feminist debt and thinking from the Global South

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a 'feminist debt'. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/ enablements that a critical reflexive politics of location puts in place for knowledge production. Firstly, it demands/enables scholarly accounts to reveal their location within the prevailing entanglements of power relations and to highlight the politics of struggle that underpin these. Secondly, it demands/enables conceptual work from different geographical spaces—and in particular, it facilitates the production of conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, a critical reflexive politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations

Translanguaging to Sustain Multilingual Communities in Higher Education

This dissertation study investigates the translanguaging interactions among teachers and students who share a common non-English language and what these exchanges might entail. It finds that multilinguals often hesitate to bring out their non-English languages in academic settings as they fear it (translanguging) may result in othering them in academic spaces since it is predominantly monolingual. Despite these challenges, multilinguals interact with their instructors through rhetorical translanguaging (Bloom-Pojar) often in peripheral spaces like the instructors’ offices. The study illustrates multilinguals rhetorically translanguage through the primary step of relationship building that reveals their complicated language ideologies. It also shows through cultivating translations spaces, they often leverage their non-English languages for content learning especially in the fields of STEM. Highlighting the challenges multilinguals report in the study, it calls writing teachers to create linguistically safe and just spaces in higher education that is conducive to culturally sustaining climate in academic settings

The European Language Resources and Technologies Forum: Shaping the Future of the Multilingual Digital Europe

Proceedings of the 1st FLaReNet Forum on the European Language Resources and Technologies, held in Vienna, at the Austrian Academy of Science, on 12-13 February 2009

Social shaping of digital publishing: exploring the interplay between culture and technology

The processes and forms of electronic publishing have been changing since the advent of the Web. In recent years, the open access movement has been a major driver of scholarly communication, and change is also evident in other fields such as e-government and e-learning. Whilst many changes are driven by technological advances, an altered social reality is also pushing the boundaries of digital publishing. With 23 articles and 10 posters, Elpub 2012 focuses on the social shaping of digital publishing and explores the interplay between culture and technology. This book contains the proceedings of the conference, consisting of 11 accepted full articles and 12 articles accepted as extended abstracts. The articles are presented in groups, and cover the topics: digital scholarship and publishing; special archives; libraries and repositories; digital texts and readings; and future solutions and innovations. Offering an overview of the current situation and exploring the trends of the future, this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves digital publishing

Emerging Insights of Health Informatics Research: A Literature Analysis for Outlining New Themes

This paper presents a contemporary literature review to provide insights into the current health informatics literature. The objective of this study is to identify emerging directions of current health informatics research from the latest and existing studies in the health informatics domain. We analyse existing health informatics studies using a thematic analysis, so that justified sets of research agenda can be outlined on the basis of these findings. We selected articles that are published in the Science Direct online database. The selected 73 sample articles (published from 2014 to 2018 in premier health informatics journals) are considered as representative samples of health informatics studies. The analysis revealed ten topic areas and themes that would be of paramount importance for researchers and practitioners to follow. The findings provide an important foundational understanding for new health informatics studies

The construction of a linguistic linked data framework for bilingual lexicographic resources

Little-known lexicographic resources can be of tremendous value to users once digitised. By extending the digitisation efforts for a lexicographic resource, converting the human readable digital object to a state that is also machine-readable, structured data can be created that is semantically interoperable, thereby enabling the lexicographic resource to access, and be accessed by, other semantically interoperable resources. The purpose of this study is to formulate a process when converting a lexicographic resource in print form to a machine-readable bilingual lexicographic resource applying linguistic linked data principles, using the English-Xhosa Dictionary for Nurses as a case study. This is accomplished by creating a linked data framework, in which data are expressed in the form of RDF triples and URIs, in a manner which allows for extensibility to a multilingual resource. Click languages with characters not typically represented by the Roman alphabet are also considered. The purpose of this linked data framework is to define each lexical entry as “historically dynamic”, instead of “ontologically static” (Rafferty, 2016:5). For a framework which has instances in constant evolution, focus is thus given to the management of provenance and linked data generation thereof. The output is an implementation framework which provides methodological guidelines for similar language resources in the interdisciplinary field of Library and Information Science