3,174 research outputs found

    Automatically generated, phonemic Arabic-IPA pronunciation tiers for the boundary annotated Qur'an dataset for machine learning (version 2.0)

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    In this paper, we augment the Boundary Annotated Qur?an dataset published at LREC 2012 (Brierley et al 2012; Sawalha et al 2012a) with automatically generated phonemic transcriptions of Arabic words. We have developed and evaluated a comprehensive grapheme-phoneme mapping from Standard Arabic \ensuremath> IPA (Brierley et al under review), and implemented the mapping in Arabic transcription technology which achieves 100% accuracy as measured against two gold standards: one for Qur?anic or Classical Arabic, and one for Modern Standard Arabic (Sawalha et al [1]). Our mapping algorithm has also been used to generate a pronunciation guide for a subset of Qur?anic words with heightened prosody (Brierley et al 2014). This is funded research under the EPSRC " Working Together" theme

    Tools for Arabic Natural Language Processing: a case study in qalqalah prosody

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    In this paper, we focus on the prosodic effect of qalqalah or "vibration" applied to a subset of Arabic consonants under certain constraints during correct Qur'anic recitation or taǧwīd, using our Boundary-Annotated Qur’an dataset of 77430 words (Brierley et al 2012; Sawalha et al 2014). These qalqalah events are rule-governed and are signified orthographically in the Arabic script. Hence they can be given abstract definition in the form of regular expressions and thus located and collected automatically. High frequency qalqalah content words are also found to be statistically significant discriminators or keywords when comparing Meccan and Medinan chapters in the Qur'an using a state-of-the-art Visual Analytics toolkit: Semantic Pathways. Thus we hypothesise that qalqalah prosody is one way of highlighting salient items in the text. Finally, we implement Arabic transcription technology (Brierley et al under review; Sawalha et al forthcoming) to create a qalqalah pronunciation guide where each word is transcribed phonetically in IPA and mapped to its chapter-verse ID. This is funded research under the EPSRC "Working Together" theme

    Open-source resources and standards for Arabic word structure analysis: Fine grained morphological analysis of Arabic text corpora

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    Morphological analyzers are preprocessors for text analysis. Many Text Analytics applications need them to perform their tasks. The aim of this thesis is to develop standards, tools and resources that widen the scope of Arabic word structure analysis - particularly morphological analysis, to process Arabic text corpora of different domains, formats and genres, of both vowelized and non-vowelized text. We want to morphologically tag our Arabic Corpus, but evaluation of existing morphological analyzers has highlighted shortcomings and shown that more research is required. Tag-assignment is significantly more complex for Arabic than for many languages. The morphological analyzer should add the appropriate linguistic information to each part or morpheme of the word (proclitic, prefix, stem, suffix and enclitic); in effect, instead of a tag for a word, we need a subtag for each part. Very fine-grained distinctions may cause problems for automatic morphosyntactic analysis – particularly probabilistic taggers which require training data, if some words can change grammatical tag depending on function and context; on the other hand, finegrained distinctions may actually help to disambiguate other words in the local context. The SALMA – Tagger is a fine grained morphological analyzer which is mainly depends on linguistic information extracted from traditional Arabic grammar books and prior knowledge broad-coverage lexical resources; the SALMA – ABCLexicon. More fine-grained tag sets may be more appropriate for some tasks. The SALMA –Tag Set is a theory standard for encoding, which captures long-established traditional fine-grained morphological features of Arabic, in a notation format intended to be compact yet transparent. The SALMA – Tagger has been used to lemmatize the 176-million words Arabic Internet Corpus. It has been proposed as a language-engineering toolkit for Arabic lexicography and for phonetically annotating the Qur’an by syllable and primary stress information, as well as, fine-grained morphological tagging

    Automatic Extraction of Quranic Lexis Representing Two Different Notions of Linguistic Salience: Keyness and Prosodic Prominence

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    This paper presents two sets of lexical items automatically extracted from the Arabic Qur’ān, and denoting two different notions of linguistic salience: keyness and prosodic prominence. Our novel hypothesis investigates a possible correlation between them. Our novel findings discover distributionally significant keywords that also occur strategically in phrase‐final position so as to maximise their prominence, and thus meaningfulness, for reader, reciter, and aural recipient. Our methodology first computes Quranic keywords via the Corpus Linguistics technique of Keyword Extraction, and maps them to major Quranic themes in Islamic scholarship. Next, we implement a bespoke algorithm for rule-based capture of words annotated with madd or prolongation, a specific type of prosodic highlighting in Quranic recitation rules or tajwīd. We find it especially interesting that the concept of final syllable lengthening (madd before pause) is encoded in tajwīid and effectively demarcates phrase boundaries in the Qur’ān. We concentrate on nominal keywords (i.e. nouns and adjectives) since these are more likely to be aligned with phrase edges and to bear the hallmarks of pre-boundary lengthening. This correlation between keyness and prominence occurs 43.29% of the time in our data, since 526 keywords appear in our extracted subset of nominal types tagged with madd before pause: ((526/1215)*100). Finally, we identify which Quranic keywords are most likely to be annotated with enhanced prolongation in the final syllable before pause, using an easy-to-interpret, single value metric: the Laplace Point Estimate. Keywords that emerge as semantically weighted in terms of both distributional and prosodic significance are most likely to reflect the Quranic themes of God, Nature, and Eschatology

    Topic identification using filtering and rule generation algorithm for textual document

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    Information stored digitally in text documents are seldom arranged according to specific topics. The necessity to read whole documents is time-consuming and decreases the interest for searching information. Most existing topic identification methods depend on occurrence of terms in the text. However, not all frequent occurrence terms are relevant. The term extraction phase in topic identification method has resulted in extracted terms that might have similar meaning which is known as synonymy problem. Filtering and rule generation algorithms are introduced in this study to identify topic in textual documents. The proposed filtering algorithm (PFA) will extract the most relevant terms from text and solve synonym roblem amongst the extracted terms. The rule generation algorithm (TopId) is proposed to identify topic for each verse based on the extracted terms. The PFA will process and filter each sentence based on nouns and predefined keywords to produce suitable terms for the topic. Rules are then generated from the extracted terms using the rule-based classifier. An experimental design was performed on 224 English translated Quran verses which are related to female issues. Topics identified by both TopId and Rough Set technique were compared and later verified by experts. PFA has successfully extracted more relevant terms compared to other filtering techniques. TopId has identified topics that are closer to the topics from experts with an accuracy of 70%. The proposed algorithms were able to extract relevant terms without losing important terms and identify topic in the verse

    Towards a textual theory of metonymy: a semiotic approach to the nature and role of metonymy in text

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    This thesis argues that the scope of metonymy throughout history remains severely reduced to a process of word substitution and the signifying potential of the trope is limited to lexical representation. The study therefore proposes a semiotic approach to take the trope beyond this limitation and to develop a textual theory to the trope. A background study related to how metonymy is treated in previous studies is therefore necessary. This review of literature covers a long period starting from ancient Greece and going up to the present day. Chapters one and two of this thesis, which give this general background, show that the hypothesis is to a large extent valid. The thesis then examines another related hypothesis which is that metonymy is semiotic in nature and a semiotic approach to metonymy will solve the problem of reductionism in the treatment of this trope. Chapter three is devoted to an examination of this hypothesis. It shows that a semiotic approach to metonymy is not only possible but also crucial. The semiotic approach to metonymy basically concerns the treatment of metonymy as a sign which cuts across three domains of representation. These are the domain of words, the domain of concepts and the domain of things or objects. The last domain is itself treated from a semiotic perspective to stand for the domain of context at large. on the basis of this semiotic approach to metonymy a textual model of metonymic relations in text is constructed. this model is put to the test in chapter four. here the metonymic relations of form for form, form for concept, form for thing, thing for form and concept for form are brought to bear on the formal and semantic connectedness of text. in chapter five the metonymic relations of concept for concept, concept for thing, thing for thing and thing for concept are used to explain how these metonymic relations interact to provide a linkage between language, cognition and context
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