Extending the corpus of contemporary Arabic

This paper reports on the development of the Corpus of Contemporary Arabic (CCA), including design, collation and deployment of the initial version, and ongoing work to extend coverage, accessibility, linguistic enrichment, and application

Compilation of an Arabic Children’s Corpus

Inspired by the Oxford Children's Corpus, we have developed a prototype corpus of Arabic texts written and/or selected for children. Our Arabic Children's Corpus of 2950 documents and nearly 2 million words has been collected manually from the web during a 3-month project. It is of high quality, and contains a range of different children's genres based on sources located, including classic tales from The Arabian Nights, and popular fictional characters such as Goha. We anticipate that the current and subsequent versions of our corpus will lead to interesting studies in text classification, language use, and ideology in children's texts

Arabic and Arab English in the Arab world

We begin with two questions about the relative status of Arabic and English in the Arab World: Is there an Arab English? And should Arab science be reported in English or Arabic? To investigate the first question, we collected a WWW corpus of English from Arab countries, and used this as a basis for comparison with UK and US English WWW-corpora. We present the differences found, and possible explanations for the differences. This leads us to some conclusions and ideas for further investigation

Novel LiAlO2 Material for Scalable and Facile Lithium Recovery Using Electrochemical Ion Pumping

In this study, α-LiAlO2 was investigated for the first time as a Li-capturing positive electrode material to recover Li from aqueous Li resources. The material was synthesized using hydrothermal synthesis and air annealing, which is a low-cost and low-energy fabrication process. The physical characterization showed that the material formed an α-LiAlO2 phase, and electrochemical activation revealed the presence of AlO2* as a Li deficient form that can intercalate Li+. The AlO2*/activated carbon electrode pair showed selective capture of Li+ ions when the concentrations were between 100 mM and 25 mM. In mono salt solution comprising 25 mM LiCl, the adsorption capacity was 8.25 mg g−1, and the energy consumption was 27.98 Wh mol Li−1. The system can also handle complex solutions such as first-pass seawater reverse osmosis brine, which has a slightly higher concentration of Li than seawater at 0.34 ppm. © 2023 by the authors.This study is made possible by Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) under National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) grant (#NPRP12S-0227-190166) and Graduate Student Research Award (GSRA) grant (#GSRA8-L-2-0411-21011).Scopu

Creating language resources for under-resourced languages: methodologies, and experiments with Arabic

Language resources are important for those working on computational methods to analyse and study languages. These resources are needed to help advancing the research in fields such as natural language processing, machine learning, information retrieval and text analysis in general. We describe the creation of useful resources for languages that currently lack them, taking resources for Arabic summarisation as a case study. We illustrate three different paradigms for creating language resources, namely: (1) using crowdsourcing to produce a small resource rapidly and relatively cheaply; (2) translating an existing gold-standard dataset, which is relatively easy but potentially of lower quality; and (3) using manual effort with appropriately skilled human participants to create a resource that is more expensive but of high quality. The last of these was used as a test collection for TAC-2011. An evaluation of the resources is also presented

The design of a corpus of contemporary Arabic

Corpora are an important resource for both teaching and research. Arabic lacks sufficient resources in this field, so a research project has been designed to compile a corpus, which represents the state of the Arabic language at the present time and the needs of end-users. This report presents the result of a survey of the needs of teachers of Arabic as a foreign language (TAFL) and language engineers. The survey shows that a wide range of text types should be included in the corpus. Overall, our survey confirms our view that existing corpora are too narrowly limited in source-type and genre, and that there is a need for a freely-accessible corpus of contemporary Arabic covering a broad range of text-types. We have collected and published an initial version of the Corpus of Contemporary Arabic (CCA) to meet these design issues. The CCA is freely downloadable via WWW from http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/arabic

Influence of 1%Nb Solute Addition on the Thermal Stability of In Situ Consolidated Nanocrystalline Cu

Nanocrystalline (nc) Cu and Cu–1% Nb bulk materials are synthesized using a combination of cryogenic and room temperature ball milling. The grain size values of these in situ consolidated Cu and Cu–1% Nb, determined using transmission electron microscopy, are found to be 22 nm and 18 nm, respectively. In this investigation, isochronal heat treatments are performed for 1 h to establish grain size and microstructural changes as a function of temperature. The annealing of nc Cu–1% Nb at a temperature of 1073 K reveals a slight increase in the average grain size from 18 to 45 nm. The grain size of nc Cu, however, increases from 22 nm to about 3 μm after annealing at the same conditions. The present results indicate that solute entrapment plays a major role in thermal stability of the high purity contaminant‐free Cu with the addition of only 1 at% Nb after annealing for 1 h up to a homologous temperature of 0.8. Kinetic stabilization via clustering of Nb atoms on the grain boundaries and the triple junctions is also observed after annealing at high temperature for longer times.This publication was made possible by the NPRP award number NPRP9-180-2-094 from the Qatar National Research FundScopu