A high level approach to Arabic sentence recognition

The aim of this work is to develop sentence recognition system inspired by the human reading process. Cognitive studies observed that the human tended to read a word as a whole at a time. He considers the global word shapes and uses contextual knowledge to infer and discriminate a word among other possible words. The sentence recognition system is a fully integrated system; a word level recogniser (baseline system) integrated with linguistic knowledge post-processing module. The presented baseline system is holistic word-based recognition approach characterised as probabilistic ranked task. The output of the system is multiple recognition hypotheses (N-best word lattice). The basic unit is the word rather than the character; it does not rely on any segmentation or require baseline detection. The considered linguistic knowledge to re-rank the output of the existing baseline system is the standard n-gram Statistical Language Models (SLMs). The candidates are re-ranked through exploiting phrase perplexity score. The system is an OCR system that depends on HMM models utilizing the HTK Toolkit. The baseline system supported by global transformation features extracted from binary word images. The adopted features' extraction technique is the block-based Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) applied to the whole word image. Feature vectors extracted using block-based DCT with non-overlapping sub-block of size 8x8 pixels. The applied HMMs to the task are mono-model discrete one-dimensional HMMs (Bakis Model). A balanced actual scanned and synthetic database of word-image has been constructed to ensure an even distribution of word samples. The Arabic words are typewritten in five fonts having a size 14 points in a plain style. The statistical language models and lexicon words are extracted from The Holy Qur‟an. The systems are applied on word images with no overlap between the training and testing datasets. The actual scanned database is used to evaluate the word recogniser. The synthetic database is a large amount of data acquired for a reliable training of sentence recognition systems. This word recogniser evaluated in mono-font and multi-font contexts. The two types of word recogniser have been used to achieve a final recognition accuracy of99.30% and 73.47% in mono-font and multi-font, respectively. The achieved average accuracy by the sentence recogniser is 67.24% improved to 78.35% on average when using 5-gram post-processing. The complexity and accuracy of the post-processing module are evaluated and found that 4-gram is more suitable than 5-gram; it is much faster at an average improvement of 76.89%

The Symphony as a Novel: Mahler’s Tenth

Ever since Theodor W. Adorno published the book Mahler. Eine Musikalische Physiognomik (‘Mahler. A Musical Physiognomy’) it has been commonplace to discuss the music of Gustav Mahler in narratological terms—that is, to search his music for structural analogies with narrative, using the approaches of ‘musical narratology’. Given their focus on only the work’s final version, however, the writings in this field do not pay enough attention to the authorial dimension of how Mahler constructs his musical ‘novel’ through the compositional process. However, a study of narrativity in the compositional process can more easily shed light on Mahler’s musical fragmentariness as a modernist expression of his music than traditional narratological approaches can. In this thesis I suggest the existence in Mahler’s Tenth Symphony of a narrative strategy I call ‘narrativisation’, which runs through the compositional process, leaving traces of what I call ‘narrativity’ in sketches and drafts. The method that supports these hypotheses is a three-stage analytical apparatus applied to each movement of the Symphony. The first stage analyses the narrativity of the Symphony’s draft of the last compositional phase. In the second stage, I then apply the method to the entire compositional process, including all the available sketches and drafts of the Symphony. In the third stage, I consider evidence from the two previous stages in support of an overall narrative interpretation of each movement and the whole Symphony. As a result of my analysis, for each movement and the entire Symphony I suggest that, during his conception of the work, Mahler manifests an overall ‘scriptorial’ narrative intention, aimed to represent in music, meta-referentially, an in-progress process of writing

Exploring Written Artefacts

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’