Quranic Arabic Semantic Search Model Based on Ontology of Concepts

The Holy Quran is the essential resource for Islamic sciences and Arabic language. Therefore, numerous Quranic search applications have been built to facilitate the retrieval of knowledge from the Quran. This thesis presents a novel Arabic Quran semantic search model. First, this thesis evaluated existing search tools constructed for the Holy Quran, against 13 criteria depending on: search features, output features, the precision of the retrieved verses, recall database size, and types of database contents. Then, the study reviewed the existing Quran ontologies and compared them against 11 criteria. Some deficits have been found in all these ontologies. Additionally, a single Quranic ontology does not cover most of the knowledge in the Quran. Therefore, I developed a new Arabic-English Quran ontology from ten datasets related to the Quran such as: Quran chapter and verse names, Quran word meanings, and Quran topics. The main aim of developing a Quranic ontology is to facilitate the retrieval of knowledge from the Quran. Additionally, the Quran ontology will enrich the raw Arabic and English Quran text with Islamic semantic tags. Furthermore, I developed the first Annotated Corpus of Quran Questions and Answers in Arabic. This corpus has 2200 pairs of question and answer collected from trusted Islamic sources. Each pair of question and answer is labelled with 5 tags. Examples of tags are: question type: either factoid or descriptive, topic of question-based on the Quran ontology, and question class. Finally, the thesis explains a new semantic search model for the Arabic Quran based on my Quran ontology. This model aims at overcoming limitations in the existing Quran search applications. This search tool employs both Information Retrieval techniques and semantic search technologies. The performance of this search model is evaluated by using The Annotated Corpus of Arabic Quran Questions and Answers

Jewish Studies in the Digital Age

The digitisation boom of the last two decades, and the rapid advancement of digital tools to analyse data in myriad ways, have opened up new avenues for humanities research. This volume discusses how the so-called digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies, explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems in the field

Jewish Studies in the Digital Age

The digitisation boom of the last two decades, and the rapid advancement of digital tools to analyse data in myriad ways, have opened up new avenues for humanities research. This volume discusses how the so-called digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies, explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems in the field

Development of an Arabic conversational intelligent tutoring system for education of children with autism spectrum disorder

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are affected in different degrees in terms of their level of intellectual ability. Some people with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism are very intelligent academically but they still have difficulties in social and communication skills. In recent years, many of these pupils are taught within mainstream schools. However, the process of facilitating their learning and participation remains a complex and poorly understood area of education. Although many teachers in mainstream schools are firmly committed to the principles of inclusive education, they do not feel that they have the necessary training and support to provide adequately for pupils with ASD. One solution for this problem is to use a virtual tutor to supplement the education of pupils with ASD in mainstream schools. This thesis describes research to develop a Novel Arabic Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System (CITS), called LANA, for children with ASD, which delivers topics related to the science subject by engaging with the user in Arabic language. The Visual, Auditory, and Kinaesthetic (VAK) learning style model is used in LANA to adapt to the children’s learning style by personalising the tutoring session. Development of an Arabic Conversational Agent has many challenges. Part of the challenge in building such a system is the requirement to deal with the grammatical features and the morphological nature of the Arabic language. The proposed novel architecture for LANA uses both pattern matching (PM) and a new Arabic short text similarity (STS) measure to extract facts from user’s responses to match rules in scripted conversation in a particular domain (Science). In this research, two prototypes of an Arabic CITS were developed (LANA-I) and (LANA-II). LANA-I was developed and evaluated with 24 neurotypical children to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the system engine. LANA-II was developed to enhance LANA-I by addressing spelling mistakes and words variation with prefix and suffix. Also in LANA-II, TEACCH method was added to the user interface to adapt the tutorial environment to the autistic students learning, and the knowledge base was expanded by adding a new tutorial. An evaluation methodology and experiment were designed to evaluate the enhanced components of LANA-II architecture. The results illustrated a statistically significant impact on the effectiveness of LANA-II engine when compared to LANA-I. In addition, the results indicated a statistically significant improvement on the autistic students learning gain with adapting to their learning styles indicating that LANA-II can be adapted to autistic children’s learning styles and enhance their learning

The Semantic Prosody of Natural Phenomena in the Qur’an: A Corpus-Based Study

This thesis explores the Semantic Prosody (SP) of natural phenomena in the Qur’an and five of its prominent English translations [Pickthall (1930), Yusuf Ali (1939/ revised edition 1987), Arberry (1957), Saheeh International (1997), and Abdel Haleem (2004)]. SP, scarcely explored in Qur’anic research, is defined as ‘a form of meaning established through the proximity of a consistent series of collocates’ (Louw 2000, p.50). Theoretically, it is both an evaluative prosody (i.e., lexical items collocating with semantic word classes that are positive, negative, or neutral) and a discourse prosody (i.e., having a communicative purpose). Given the stylistic uniqueness of the Qur’an and considering that SP can be examined empirically via corpora, the present study explores the SP of 154 words associated with nature referenced throughout the Qur’an using Corpus Linguistics techniques. Firstly, the Python-based Natural Language Toolkit was used for the following: to define nature terms via WordNet; to disambiguate their variant forms with Stemmers, and to compute their frequencies. Once frequencies were found, a quantitative analysis using Evert’s (2008) five-step statistical analysis was implemented on the 30 most frequent terms to investigate their collocations and SPs. Following this, a qualitative analysis was conducted as per the Extended Lexical Unit via concordance to analyse collocations and the Lexical-Functional Grammar to find the variation of meanings produced by lexico-grammatical patterns. Finally, the resulting datasets were aligned to evaluate their congruency with the Qur’an. Findings of this research confirm that words referring to nature in the Qur’an do have semantic prosody. For example, astronomical bodies are primed to occur in predominantly positive collocations referring to glorifying God, while weather phenomena in negative ones refer to Day of Judgment calamities. In addition, results show that Abdel-Haleem’s translation can be considered the most congruent. This research develops an approach to explore themes (e.g., nature) via SP analysis in texts and their translations and provides several linguistic resources that can be used for future corpus-based studies on the language of the Qur’an.

Remote Sensing and Geosciences for Archaeology

This book collects more than 20 papers, written by renowned experts and scientists from across the globe, that showcase the state-of-the-art and forefront research in archaeological remote sensing and the use of geoscientific techniques to investigate archaeological records and cultural heritage. Very high resolution satellite images from optical and radar space-borne sensors, airborne multi-spectral images, ground penetrating radar, terrestrial laser scanning, 3D modelling, Geographyc Information Systems (GIS) are among the techniques used in the archaeological studies published in this book. The reader can learn how to use these instruments and sensors, also in combination, to investigate cultural landscapes, discover new sites, reconstruct paleo-landscapes, augment the knowledge of monuments, and assess the condition of heritage at risk. Case studies scattered across Europe, Asia and America are presented: from the World UNESCO World Heritage Site of Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa to heritage under threat in the Middle East and North Africa, from coastal heritage in the intertidal flats of the German North Sea to Early and Neolithic settlements in Thessaly. Beginners will learn robust research methodologies and take inspiration; mature scholars will for sure derive inputs for new research and applications

Scriptinformatics

Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa on the basis of their morphological similarity, and does not primarily examine genealogical relationships. Due to the scarcity of morphological diversity of scripts’ features, random coincidences of evolution-independent features are much more common in scripts than in biological species, thus phenetic modelling based solely on morphological features can lead to erroneous results. For this reason, phenetic modeling has been extended with evolutionary considerations, thereby allowing the modelling uncertainties observed in the script evolution to be addressed due to the large number of random coincidences (homoplasies) characterizing each script. The book describes an extended phenetic method developed to investigate the script evolution. This data-driven approach helps to reduce the impact of the uncertainties inherent in the phenetic model due to the large number of homoplasies that occur during the evolution of scripts. The elaborated phenetic and evolutionary analyses were applied to the Rovash scripts used on the Eurasian Steppe (Grassland), including the Turkic Rovash (Turkic Runic/runiform) and the Székely-Hungarian Rovash. The evaluation of the extended phenetic model of the scripts, the various phenograms, the script spectra and the group spectra helped to reconstruct the main ancestors and evolutionary stages of the investigated scripts

IKUWA6. Shared Heritage

Celebrating the theme ‘Shared heritage’, IKUWA6 (the 6th International Congress for Underwater Archaeology), was the first such major conference to be held in the Asia-Pacific region, and the first IKUWA meeting hosted outside Europe since the organisation’s inception in Germany in the 1990s. A primary objective of holding IKUWA6 in Australia was to give greater voice to practitioners and emerging researchers across the Asia and Pacific regions who are often not well represented in northern hemisphere scientific gatherings of this scale; and, to focus on the areas of overlap in our mutual heritage, techniques and technology. Drawing together peer-reviewed presentations by delegates from across the world who converged in Fremantle in 2016 to participate, this volume covers a stimulating diversity of themes and niche topics of value to maritime archaeology practitioners, researchers, students, historians and museum professionals across the world

Faktor Pengaruh Bahasa Inggeris dalam Pembelajaran Bahasa Mandarin Sebagai Bahasa Asing

Salah satu nilai tambah yang amat diperlukan pada masa kini ialah penguasaan bahasa asing. Pelan Pembangunan Pendidikan Malaysia 2013-2015 telah mengetengahkan pembelajaran bahasa ketiga. Menurut Teori Bahasa Halliday, kanak-kanak menjadi mahir dalam bahasa kerana mereka perlu berinteraksi dengan orang di persekitaran mereka. Ini bermakna untuk memenuhi keperluan asas mereka, kanak-kanak itu perlu berinteraksi dengan orang ramai pada peringkat awal. Fenomena ini tidak berlaku dalam sampel. Oleh itu, pelajar Melayu yang hanya berbahasa Melayu dan Inggeris tidak akan mempelajari bahasa Mandarin dengan baik. Kajian awal ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis faktor-faktor yang menyumbang kepada pengaruh bahasa Inggeris dalam kalangan pelajar Melayu semasa mempelajari bahasa Mandarin. Sampel kajian melibatkan 10 orang pelajar Melayu di sebuah universiti awam. Instrumen yang digunakan dalam kajian ini ialah soal selidik. Dapatan kajian ini diharapkan dapat membantu ahli akademik dalam melahirkan graduan yang berkualiti tinggi dengan kebolehan bertutur dalam bahasa ketiga dengan fasih. Selain itu, ia juga akan meningkatkan reputasi universiti dengan pencapaian pelajar yang cemerlang, sekali gus memberi manfaat kepada pembangunan negara khususnya dalam hubungan antarabangsa