Keep It Simple Sheffield – a KISS approach to the Arabic track

Sheffield’s participation in the inaugural Arabic cross language track is described here. Our goal was to examine how well one could achieve retrieval of Arabic text with the minimum of resources and adaptation of existing retrieval systems. To this end the public translators used for query translation and the minimal changes to our retrieval system are described. While the effectiveness of our resulting system is not as high as one might desire, it nevertheless provides reasonable performance particularly in the monolingual track: on average, just under four relevant documents were found in the 10 top ranked documents

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

Columbia Chronicle (10/21/2013)

Student newspaper from October 21, 2013 entitled The Columbia Chronicle. This issue is 48 pages and is listed as Volume 49, Number 8. Cover story: Fundraising falls, Carter collects Editor-in-Chief: Lindsey Woodshttps://digitalcommons.colum.edu/cadc_chronicle/1888/thumbnail.jp

"Inbetweeners" : dialogic strategies and practices for writing Arab migration through intercultural theatre : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

This thesis deploys both critical and creative methodologies to address the research question ‘How can playwriting contribute to an understanding of intercultural experiences, identities, and differences between the Middle East and the West?’ When I began this research journey, as a Jordanian-born Muslim playwright now living in Aotearoa New Zealand, I wanted to write a ‘great Arab theatre’ to capture the potentials and positive outcomes of the immigration experiences of Middle Easterners and Muslims and their transnational movements, re-settlements, and inbetweenness, as well as acknowledge the suffering of a region that has been subjected to generations of colonial trauma and is little understood and deeply stereotyped by the West. I wanted to creatively investigate the ways in which migration, and now a global pandemic that has rewritten our understanding of borders, have both fractured and expanded my viewpoints on myself, my culture, and my birthplace. As I explored scholarly models of trauma, I discovered that they, too, have been characterised by colonial thinking and often deploy limited cultural stereotypes as metaphors to explain and address trauma. None of these models fit my experiences. There are uniquely Arab models of storytelling and performance but, looking at many of the key playwrights from the region showed a deep interweaving of Western playwriting traditions in their work as well. Again, these Western-influenced elements seemed to me in part useful yet ultimately inadequate containers to hold my experiences or grasp the wider backdrop of my region’s complex and contested histories. My goal became to find new, expanded, theatrical forms to initiate a dialogue between concepts of diasporic identity, trauma, conflict, and colonial history in the context of the Middle East and its relationships with its Others - including through the specific trajectory of my own journey and how my subjectivity has been shattered and reformed by multiple transnational relocations. I found it helpful to draw on scholarship about intercultural theatre, but I also developed new models of structure and characterisation that depart from and explicitly reject Western models in novel ways, to try to capture the uniqueness of ‘inbetweenness’ that is symptomatic of my region, myself, and my culture. Linear temporality, fixed characterisation, discrete scene plotting, causal action sequences, character hierarchies, and monolingual, unequivocally purposeful dialogue are all rejected in my playwriting, in favour of forms that I found, through the experiment of writing, better reflected the exploded and shapeshifting terms of identity and experience that I know to be true for myself and many others who have, like me, spanned their lives across continents, cultures, languages, religions, traditions, and histories, then ended up finding it difficult to know what is real. In my playwriting, I wanted to recreate that hybridity of both peaceful and contentious cross-cultural exchange and so I developed a kaleidoscopic metaphor to express a blend of different elements that change perpetually and move disorientingly, yet emerge anew, creatively and beautifully. Deploying my kaleidoscopic model of playwriting both thematically and structurally, I wrote a script that conveyed at least some partial sense of what it might mean to be ‘Arab’ in today’s world, and especially, what it might feel like to be ‘Arab’ in Aotearoa. The research was conducted, and the thesis is submitted, in the discipline of creative writing. It is the playwriting itself that constitutes the research experiment, along with the exegetic material that observes and analyses the act of creation including the aesthetic techniques, sources, and motivations. The thesis thus begins with four critical chapters that set out the background to and rationale for the creative work, then concludes with “Aragoze”, a trilogy of plays that embodies the aims of the research to contribute through both its form and its content to an understanding of intercultural experiences and identities situated in between the Middle East and the West

The View from Ventress - 2015

Special Section: Research and Create. The College of Liberal Arts’ 18 departments, eight interdisciplinary programs, and 13 centers/institutes range from the natural sciences and social sciences to the fine arts and humanities. Through individual and collaborative efforts, faculty and students push the boundaries of our understanding and appreciation of the world around us. They analyze and create; they publish, discuss, and perform.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_news/1023/thumbnail.jp

The application of traditional abstract painting in new media environments

This thesis presents an investigation into the process of new fonns of installation art; an exploration of the shifting of artistic activities from conventional studios and fine artist practices to installation art practices. A combined approach was taken whilst undertaking research by studying literature within the field, engaging with other practicing artists and conducting practical analysis. There is also a discussion of new technology in the field of abstract expressionist painting and a dialogue on the differences between traditional and digital abstract painting with regard to their processes. The reflective and issue finding processes undertaken by the researcher in this investigation are discussed in relation to the changes in his practice. The artist's experimentation with materials and processes and the implications of this as regards the relationship between the artwork and the viewer are also discussed. The thesis is divided into seven chapters of text and images with an accompanying DVD including the main abstract new media installation. The first chapter includes an introduction to the research with the methodology . applied. The second chapter involves using the computer to produce abstract painting. The third chapter then focuses on the differences between digital .and traditional abstract painting. Moving on from this the fourth chapter covers multimedia installation and its associated processes. The fifth chapter deals with the reflections on the practice element of this investigation. The sixth chapter engages with the evaluation of and feedback from the field trip and with notes from artists with regard to practical production. The final chapter draws conclusions from this research with suggestions for further studies. This thesis will make the following contributions to knowledge: developing the process of animation from 2D abstract painting to a 3D environment with the inclusion of animation; using new technology as a creative tool to enable artists to gain new insights into creative art practices which provide audiences with new experiences of new and multimedia installation; advancing the creative process of new and multimedia artworks taking account ofnew techniques relating to the manipulation of viewpoints, picture planes and pigment surface as related to traditional methods of image creation and recording and their new media counterparts.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Globalistics And Globalization Studies: Aspects & Dimensions Of Global Views

Nowadays globalization processes have become all-embracing. But at the same time, despite the ever-increasing flow of publications on globalization, our understanding and knowledge of it still leaves much to be desired. Especially it concerns the global processes in general, of which globalization is a part. We also need to systematize our ideas about globalization and Global Studies to somehow fit the realities. In particular, this concerns the education process, because the current state of education will determine the way people will perceive reality in the forthcoming decades. This yearbook aims at contributing to the solution of these important tasks. It is the third in the series of yearbooks titled Globalistics and Globalization Studies. This year it has the following subtitle: Aspects & Dimensions of Global Views. Its authors consider globalization and Global Studies in different dimensions and aspects: philosophical, methodological, and pedagogical, in terms of various processes, problems and perspectives. Of course, to some extent this means that this yearbook presents rather diverse materials. But globalization itself is very diverse. And its comprehension may proceed in the framework of different theoretical approaches and points of view. In the present yearbook one can find perceptions of globalization and Global Studies by a number of scholars from different countries of the world and learn rather peculiar visions of globalization by the Russian scientists and educators. The yearbook will be interesting to a wide range of researchers, teachers, students and all those who pay attention to global issues