Humanities eInfrastructure initiatives in Denmark

ABSTRACT This paper presents an overview of the policies and decisions which have resulted in the current research infrastructure landscape in Denmark within the humanities, and it describes individual initiatives and how they fit into the landscape. The landscape was fragmented, and it still is to a degree, but one key factor has played a determining role in shaping it into what it is today: the European strategic processes and policies following from the development of the European Research Area, and the ESFRI (European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructure) process, which has been adopted by Danish policy and decision makers. The strategies and priorities based on the European ESFRI process has resulted in funding of Danish research infrastructure (RI) initiatives within the humanities in the last 5-6 years, such that we can now define a landscape with national, Nordic and European collaboration and networking, extended into the social sciences community as well. The list of initiatives is comprehensive: CLARIN, META-NORD, META-NET, DARIAH, DASISH, CLARA, ASTIN, DIGHUMLAB, DIGDAG, LARM

Final FLaReNet deliverable: Language Resources for the Future - The Future of Language Resources

Language Technologies (LT), together with their backbone, Language Resources (LR), provide an essential support to the challenge of Multilingualism and ICT of the future. The main task of language technologies is to bridge language barriers and to help creating a new environment where information flows smoothly across frontiers and languages, no matter the country, and the language, of origin. To achieve this goal, all players involved need to act as a community able to join forces on a set of shared priorities. However, until now the field of Language Resources and Technology has long suffered from an excess of individuality and fragmentation, with a lack of coherence concerning the priorities for the field, the direction to move, not to mention a common timeframe. The context encountered by the FLaReNet project was thus represented by an active field needing a coherence that can only be given by sharing common priorities and endeavours. FLaReNet has contributed to the creation of this coherence by gathering a wide community of experts and making them participate in the definition of an exhaustive set of recommendations

Anaphora resolution for Arabic machine translation :a case study of nafs

PhD ThesisIn the age of the internet, email, and social media there is an increasing need for processing online information, for example, to support education and business. This has led to the rapid development of natural language processing technologies such as computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data mining. As a branch of computational linguistics, anaphora resolution has attracted much interest. This is reflected in the large number of papers on the topic published in journals such as Computational Linguistics. Mitkov (2002) and Ji et al. (2005) have argued that the overall quality of anaphora resolution systems remains low, despite practical advances in the area, and that major challenges include dealing with real-world knowledge and accurate parsing. This thesis investigates the following research question: can an algorithm be found for the resolution of the anaphor nafs in Arabic text which is accurate to at least 90%, scales linearly with text size, and requires a minimum of knowledge resources? A resolution algorithm intended to satisfy these criteria is proposed. Testing on a corpus of contemporary Arabic shows that it does indeed satisfy the criteria.Egyptian Government

Fine-grained Arabic named entity recognition

This thesis addresses the problem of fine-grained NER for Arabic, which poses unique linguistic challenges to NER; such as the absence of capitalisation and short vowels, the complex morphology, and the highly in infection process. Instead of classifying the detected NE phrases into small sets of classes, we target a broader range (i.e. 50 fine-grained classes 'hierarchal-based of two levels') to increase the depth of the semantic knowledge extracted. This has increased the number of classes, complicating the task, when compared with traditional (coarse-grained) NER, because of the increase in the number of semantic classes and the decrease in semantic differences between fine-grained classes. Our approach to developing fine-grained NER relies on two different supervised Machine Learning (ML) technologies (i.e. Maximum Entropy 'ME' and Conditional Random Fields 'CRF'), which require annotated training data in order to learn by extracting informative features. We develop a methodology which exploit the richness of Arabic Wikipedia (A W) in order to create a scalable fine-grained lexical resource and a corpus automatically. Moreover, two gold-standard created corpora from different genres were also developed to perform comparable evaluation. The thesis also developed a new approach to feature representation by relying on the dependency structure of the sentence to overcome the limitation of traditional window-based (i.e. n-gram) representation. Furthermore, by exploiting the richness of unannotated textual data to extract global informative features using word-level clustering technique was also achieved. Each contribution was evaluated via controlled experiment and reported using three commonly applied metrics, i.e. precision, recall and harmonic F-measure

Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT

Combining Speech with textual methods for arabic diacritization

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

ORTHOGRAPHIC ENRICHMENT FOR ARABIC GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Linguistics, 2010The Arabic orthography is problematic in two ways: (1) it lacks the short vowels, and this leads to ambiguity as the same orthographic form can be pronounced in many different ways each of which can have its own grammatical category, and (2) the Arabic word may contain several units like pronouns, conjunctions, articles and prepositions without an intervening white space. These two problems lead to difficulties in the automatic processing of Arabic. The thesis proposes a pre-processing scheme that applies word segmentation and word vocalization for the purpose of grammatical analysis: part of speech tagging and parsing. The thesis examines the impact of human-produced vocalization and segmentation on the grammatical analysis of Arabic, then applies a pipeline of automatic vocalization and segmentation for the purpose of Arabic part of speech tagging. The pipeline is then used, along with the POS tags produced, for the purpose of dependency parsing, which produces grammatical relations between the words in a sentence. The study uses the memory-based algorithm for vocalization, segmentation, and part of speech tagging, and the natural language parser MaltParser for dependency parsing. The thesis represents the first approach to the processing of real-world Arabic, and has found that through the correct choice of features and algorithms, the need for pre-processing for grammatical analysis can be minimized

National Identity of Arab Citizens in Israel: A Socio-Educational Study of the Palestinian Minority in the “Hand in Hand” Bilingual Schools

Wydział Studiów EdukacyjnychNiniejsze studium badawcze ukazuje kształtowanie się tożsamości narodowej ucznia arabskiego w szkołach dwujęzycznych w Izraelu. Badania kontynuują twierdzenia większości badaczy, przedstawione w przeglądzie literatury, dotyczące sytuacji i jakości arabskiego systemu edukacji w Izraelu, w zakresie kształcenia, osiągnięć oraz rozwoju osobowości i tożsamości arabskiego ucznia. Stwierdzono, że podręczniki i ich treść oraz cele państwowej edukacji w Izraelu całkowicie ignorują potrzeby arabskiego ucznia w państwowych publicznych szkołach arabskich w Izraelu, w wymiarze osobistym, społecznym, kulturowym i narodowym. W wyniku rozczarowania intelektualnego społeczeństwa arabskiego sytuacją i jakością nauczania w szkołach arabskich we wszystkich dziedzinach, zaczął się ostatnio rozwijać trend "edukacji alternatywnej". Arabscy rodzice zaczynają szukać, a nawet zakładać prywatne szkoły jako alternatywę dla szkół publicznych. Ponieważ w publicznych szkołach arabskich nie ma edukacji narodowej, ani formalnej, ani nieformalnej, pole badawcze dotyczyło rozwoju tożsamości narodowej w szkołach dwujęzycznych należących do Stowarzyszenia Hand in Hand. W badaniach własnych autorka przyjęła strategię badań o charakterze jakościowym. W badaniach wykorzystano wywiady półstrukturalne, a populacja badawcza składała się z dwunastu arabskich nauczycieli, dwunastu arabskich absolwentów, dwunastu arabskich rodziców i trzech arabskich dyrektorów. Wszyscy badani pochodzili ze szkół dwujęzycznych. Wyniki badań wskazują na rozwój trendu alternatywnej edukacji prywatnej w społeczeństwie arabskim. Ponadto stwierdzono, że szkoły dwujęzyczne, będące szkołami dwunarodowymi, odniosły sukces w realizacji swojej roli w zakresie jakości kształcenia, w aspekcie pedagogicznym, społecznym i kulturowym oraz w kształtowaniu i wzmacnianiu osobistej i narodowej tożsamości arabskiego ucznia w większym stopniu, niż jednonarodowe publiczne szkoły arabskie. Tajemnicą tego sukcesu jest "jakość" rodziców, którzy posyłają swoje dzieci do tych szkół. Dotyczy to zarówno rodziców izraelskich, jak i arabskich, z których większość należy do wyższej klasy społeczno-ekonomicznej i którzy uznają znaczenie dobrej edukacji dla swoich dzieci. Edukacja ta uwzględnia kształtowanie osobowości ucznia i dostrzega jego podmiotowość. Równie ważne są wartości edukacji humanistycznej oraz efektywne nauczanie.This research study shows the formation of the national identity of the Arab student in the bilingual schools in Israel. This research study continues the assertion of most researchers, as presented in the review of the literature, about the situations and quality of the Arab education system in Israel, in terms of teaching-pedagogy, achievements, and the development of the personality and the identity of the Arab student. It was found that the “core” studies, the textbooks and their contents, and the goals of state education in Israel ignore completely the needs of the Arab student in the state public Arab schools in Israel, in personal, social, cultural, and national terms. As a result of the disappointment of intellectual Arab society with the situation and quality of teaching in the Arab schools with all the areas, there began to develop recently the trend of “alternative education”, in which the Arab parents begin to search for and even to establish themselves private schools as an alternative to the public schools. Since in the public Arab schools there is no national education, whether formal or informal, the research field addressed the development of the national identity in the bilingual schools that belong to the Hand in Hand Association. The research method is qualitative. The research instruments were semi-structured interviews, when the research population consisted of twelve Arab teachers, twelve Arab graduates, twelve Arab parents, and three Arab principals, all from the bilingual schools. The research result is the development of a trend of alternative private education in Arab society. In addition, it was found that the bilingual schools, which are binational schools, succeeded in implementing their role in terms of the quality of education, in the pedagogical, social, and cultural aspects in general and in the formation and reinforcement of the Arab student’s personal and national identity in particular, more than did the single-national public Arab schools. The secret of this success is the “quality” of the parents who send their children to these schools, both Jews and Arabs, most of whom belong to the upper class in social-economic terms and who recognize the importance of a good education for their children in the aspects of the formation of the student’s personality, the student at the center, the values of a humanist education, as well as good instruction

Perceptions of final year undergraduate education students about the influence of a reading culture on their academic achievement at selected universities in Tanzania.

Doctor of Philosophy in Information Studies. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2017.The study investigated the perceptions of final year undergraduate education students about the influence of a reading culture on their academic achievement at selected universities in Tanzania. Four universities were involved in the study namely: Sokoine University of Agriculture, Mzumbe University, Teofilo Kisanji University and University of Iringa. Social Cognitive Theory informed the study. Pragmatism paradigm underpinned this study, while mixed methods using survey questionnaire and interviews were used for the data collection. Questionnaire was used to collect data from 312 students and 62 lecturers while interview was administered to 50 subject librarians. Quantitative data were analysed using IBM SPSS version 20.0 to generate tables, charts, percentages and frequencies, while Chi-square was generated to determine relationships between variables. Finally, qualitative data were analysed using thematic analysis. Reliability and validity were ensured by adopting instruments from studies with acceptable Cronbach’s Alpha value of >0.7. The study adhered to the ethical protocol of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The findings showed that there was a high level of awareness among students, lecturers, and librarians regarding influence of reading culture on students’ academic achievements. The students perceived their reading self-efficacies as enabler to promoting reading culture. The findings revealed students rarely spent time reading for leisure, for information or for entertainment. The results also showed students rarely visited the library. The results further showed that factors which motivated students to read include reading to gain knowledge, reading for entertainment purposes, reading for examinations, tests, assignments and research projects. The study concluded that students in universities lacked reading culture but were motivated to read for the purpose of passing examinations, tests, assignments and research projects. There was absence of policy on reading culture and this impacted negatively on students’ academic achievement. The study consequently advanced recommendations among them strategies, policy, curricular transformation, programmes and guidelines in order to improve academic achievement of students