Regressing Consumer Price Index on selected Financial Market Indicators in Nigeria

The post-2008 fear of the financial meltdown seems to have reduced the interest of investors in financial investments such as treasury bills, Government bonds and Development stock. Was there a relationship between these indicators and inflation in Nigeria? Using a times series data from 1987-2010, a multiple regression model was adapted (with some adjustments in consideration to the Nigerian Situation) from the model of Norliza, Malaysia. The Augmented Dickey Fuller Unit root diagnostic test (ADF) was used to test for Stationarity.  Government bond rate was stationary (p = 0.0000) at level. Development stock was stationary (p = 0.0343) at 5% first difference. Treasury bill rate time series data however was stationary (p = 0.0064) at first difference. Commercial papers rate was stationary (p = 0.0002) at level, The data for annual inflation rate in Nigeria was not stationary up to 4th difference, hence it was removed from the model and replaced with Consumer Price Index (CPI)  which was stationary at 5% level (p = 0.0357). The coefficients of the explanatory variables were -0.0600, -0.047, -1.073,  -0.045 and  -0.005, for commercial papers rates,  Interest rates, government bond rates, Development stocks and Treasury bills rates, respectively. Consequently, the empirical regression function indicated that all the explanatory variables were negative to the CPI. This implies that when an incremental change occurs in any of the explanatory variables, CPI will fall. The necessity was the relevance of sustaining investment interest in the indicators, which called for Investment Interest Sustenance Program (IISP) and/or Investment Holding Trap (IHT). Key words: Consumer Price Index, financial market indicators, Inflation rate, Development stock and rates of returns. JEL Classification: C25, E44, G13, E4

Impact of social media language on writings of the undergraduates of university of Nigeria, Nsukka

This paper investigated the impact of social media language on writings of the undergraduates of University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The aim of this paper was to identify the extent to which SMS language has influenced the writings of undergraduates. Also, to confirm or refute the arguments and counteraugments that had raised dust in the academics over the presupposed negative effects of this form of media discourse on students’ academic writings. This study draws insights from Corder’s Error Analysis. The corpus of this study was gotten from an eight-item-questionnaire and confirmatory essay test administered to forty students selected at random. Data elicited from the questionnaires were  analyzed quantitatively using the simple percentage and represented in bar charts and lines respectively; while the students’ essays were scanned for linguistic features of SMS. The findings revealed that students’ use of SMS is pervasive but it does not significantly impact writings negatively. The researchers, therefore, concluded that SMS language does not pose major threats to students’ formal writings. Thus, they suggested that users of SMS should try as much as they could to always check their works carefully in order to avoid committing errors in formal writings.Keywords: Error Analysis, impact, linguistic features, social media language, and writin

Assessing Problem Areas in Senior Secondary Students’ Use of the English Concord

This research succinctly explicates the areas of problem in Senior Secondary Students’ use of the English Concord in written texts. Language is a social property and has rules that determine how words should be matched to achieve effective communication. Concord in English deals with those rules that govern the co-occurrence of words in sentences. This work is a practical classroom experience and it x–rays the students’ performance in the grammatical, notional and proximity concords respectively. The findings are clearly presented in statistical tables and each of the tables shows the students’ performance in each of the areas. The result shows that the students performed fairly well in notional and proximity concords. The total results, however, led to the conclusion that the students are yet to attain competence in the English concord for good communication

The Production and Perception of the Affricate /tʃ/ and the Fricative /ʃ/ by Igala ELS Users

A second language user is one who has his own language (L1) and probably mastered all there is to the sound system of his L1. The already existing language system makes second language learning difficult thereby resulting in what is called ‘errors’ as an effect of interference. Phonologically, it is a hard task learning a second language because each language has its unique phonology. This paper x-rayed the difficulties encountered by Igala L2 users with reference to the production and perception of the affricate /tʃ/ and the fricative /ʃ/. The study used carefully prepared sentences containing the two sounds under study to elicit data from the target population. The data were analyzed using frequency and percentage counts. From the analysis it was discovered that there exist production problems in the use of the affricate /tʃ/ and the fricative /ʃ/ by Igala users of English as a Second Language where /tʃ/ is substituted for /ʃ/ and vice versa.  Conclusion drawn from the result was the need for Igala users to aspire for competence in their use of English as a second language particularly the phonological aspects because being proficient in any language begins with good understanding and correct usage of the sound systems thereby bringing about intelligibility

Assessing E-Learning Tools in an Academic Environment: A Study of Availability and Use among Undergraduate Students in a Nigerian University

This study investigated the availability and use of e-learning tools as emerging paradigms in Covenant University, Nigeria. The study population comprise of 7000 undergraduate students, out of which 1000 was used as sample. Questionnaire was used as data collecting tool for the study. A total of five hundred and eleven questionnaires were filled and returned. The study revealed that an appreciable number of e-learning tools were available and in use in the University. Notable among them is an electronic learning management system - Moodle. Most of the respondents (61.8%) indicated that they used the e-learning tools mostly for downloading lecture notes. The study further revealed that there was no significant relationship between students' level of study (class) and their use of elearning tools. Also, no significant relationship between use of e-learning tools and academic performance was established. Majority of the respondents (54%) identified inadequate internet access as the biggest challenge to students' use of e-learning platforms. The study was concluded with recommendations that could enhance the use of e-learning platforms in Universities in Nigeri

Short Utterance Dialogue Act Classification Using a Transformer Ensemble

An influx of digital assistant adoption and reliance is demonstrating the significance of reliable and robust dialogue act classification techniques. In the literature, there is an over-representation of purely lexical-based dialogue act classification methods. A weakness of this approach is the lack of context when classifying short utterances. We improve upon a purely lexical approach by incorporating a state-of-the-art acoustic model in a lexical-acoustic transformer ensemble, with improved results, when classifying dialogue acts in the MRDA corpus. Additionally, we further investigate the performance on an utterance word-count basis, showing classification accuracy increases with utterance word count. Furthermore, the performance of the lexical model increases with utterance word length and the acoustic model performance decreases with utterance word count, showing the models complement each other for different utterance lengths

Library Professionals and Social Network Sites: Use, Relevance and Challenges from University Libraries in Ogun State, Nigeria

The use of social network sites among library professionals in university libraries in Ogun State, Southwest Nigeria is investigated. The study population consisted of seventy-eight librarians in four universities in the state. Questionnaires (which was the instrument for data collection) were administered to the entire population, out of which 55 (representing 70.5 % response rate) were filled, returned and analysed for the study. The study revealed that library professionals do make use of SNS. The most frequently visited SNS was Linkedln (58.2 %). The respondents also indicated that they visited SNS for the purpose of connecting and collaborating with friends and colleagues, carrying out current awareness and reference services to library users, etc. Majority of the respondents (94.5 %) in the study further revealed that the greatest challenge to the use of social network sites was lack of social media skills. The first hypothesis tested in the study indicated that there was moderate positive significant relationship between device used for internet access and use of social network sites (r=.408**, N= 55, p.05). The study was concluded with recommendations that library professionals should undergo training in social media skills

Information Access for Rural Women in Nigeria

Adequate access and effective use of information is succinctly linked to sustainable development and empowerment of rural women. Analysis of the situation reveals that Nigerian rural women face marginalization as far as information access is concerned. This chapter identified some channels and preferred sources of information for the rural women with their inherent challenges. Some implications were also discussed ranging from exploitation and trafficking of women, inability to access and harness agriculture and health information, credit facilities and government programs. Some challenges of information provision to rural women as identified include lack of basic infrastructure, poverty, illiteracy, culture, and religion. The study recommended some strategies for improvement as regards quality access to information: establishment of vibrant public libraries in rural areas, continuous research on information seeking behaviour of rural women, information repackaging, provision of adult educational centres. The chapter concluded that neglect of rural women can only portend dange

Fraud detection in telephone conversations for financial services using linguistic features

Detecting the elements of deception in a conversation is one of the most challenging problems for the AI community. It becomes even more difficult to design a transparent system, which is fully explainable and satisfies the need for financial and legal services to be deployed. This paper presents an approach for fraud detection in transcribed telephone conversations using linguistic features. The proposed approach exploits the syntactic and semantic information of the transcription to extract both the linguistic markers and the sentiment of the customer’s response. We demonstrate the results on real-world financial services data using simple, robust and explainable classifiers such as Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Nearest Neighbours, and Support Vector Machines

Towards Curbing Plagiarism in Higher Institutions of Learning: The Strategic Role of the Library

Lack of academic integrity has frustrated the attainment of educational objectives especially in tertiary institutions in recent times. Perhaps, one of the most prevalent fraudulent practice among students, academics and researchers today is plagiarism. This paper examines the concept, nature and intricacies of plagiarism. It notes the devastating effects of plagiarism on the individual, academic institutions and the society at large. The paper argues that libraries by their assigned and inherent functions have a strategic role to play in curbing plagiarism. The roles include awareness creation, teaching of referencing and citation skills, information literacy programmes among others. The paper concludes with further recommendations for dealing with the menace of plagiarism