Unifying linguistic annotations and ontologies for the Arabic Quran

The WACL’2 Second Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics was held in conjunction with the Corpus Linguistics 2013 conference. Following on from the successful first WACL in 2011, as well as the related LRE-REL event in 2012, WACL-2 again took place at Lancaster University. The aim of this series of workshops is to create a venue for exploring progress in the field of research into the Arabic language using corpora, from across the many areas of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics where the analysis of Arabic structure and usage is an active issue. The scope of the workshop encompasses both (a) the design, construction and annotation of Arabic corpora, and (b) the use of corpora in research on the Arabic language – in any relevant area, including (but not limited to!) lexis and lexicography, syntax, collocation, NLP systems and analysis tools, contrastive and historical studies, stylistics, and discourse analysis. All varieties of Arabic – including the different Colloquial Arabics as well as Classical/Qur’anic and Modern Standard forms of the language – are within the workshop's purview

Splitting Arabic Texts into Elementary Discourse Units

International audienceIn this article, we propose the first work that investigates the feasibility of Arabic discourse segmentation into elementary discourse units within the segmented discourse representation theory framework. We first describe our annotation scheme that defines a set of principles to guide the segmentation process. Two corpora have been annotated according to this scheme: elementary school textbooks and newspaper documents extracted from the syntactically annotated Arabic Treebank. Then, we propose a multiclass supervised learning approach that predicts nested units. Our approach uses a combination of punctuation, morphological, lexical, and shallow syntactic features. We investigate how each feature contributes to the learning process. We show that an extensive morphological analysis is crucial to achieve good results in both corpora. In addition, we show that adding chunks does not boost the performance of our system

The dopamine D1 receptor is expressed and induces CREB phosphorylation and MUC5AC expression in human airway epithelium

Background Dopamine receptors comprise two subgroups, Gs protein-coupled “D1-like” receptors (D1, D5) and Gi-coupled “D2-like” receptors (D2, D3, D4). In airways, both dopamine D1 and D2 receptors are expressed on airway smooth muscle and regulate airway smooth muscle force. However, functional expression of the dopamine D1 receptor has never been identified on airway epithelium. Activation of Gs-coupled receptors stimulate adenylyl cyclase leading to cyclic AMP (cAMP) production, which is known to induce mucus overproduction through the cAMP response element binding protein (CREB) in airway epithelial cells. We questioned whether the dopamine D1 receptor is expressed on airway epithelium, and whether it promotes CREB phosphorylation and MUC5AC expression. Methods We evaluated the protein expression of the dopamine D1 receptor on native human airway epithelium and three sources of cultured human airway epithelial cells including primary cultured airway epithelial cells, the bronchial epithelial cell line (16HBE14o-), and the pulmonary mucoepidermoid carcinoma cell line (NCI-H292) using immunohistochemistry and immunoblotting. To characterize the stimulation of cAMP through the dopamine D1 receptor, 16HBE14o- cells and NCI-H292 cells were treated with dopamine or the dopamine D1 receptor agonists (SKF38393 or A68930) before cAMP measurements. The phosphorylation of CREB by A68930 in both 16HBE14o- and NCI-H292 cells was measured by immunoblot. The effect of dopamine or A68930 on the expression of MUC5AC mRNA and protein in NCI-H292 cells was evaluated by real-time PCR and immunofluorescence staining, respectively. Results The dopamine D1 receptor protein was detected in native human airway epithelium and three sources of cultured human airway epithelial cells. Dopamine or the dopamine D1-like receptor agonists stimulated cAMP production in 16HBE14o- cells and NCI-H292 cells, which was reversed by the selective dopamine D1-like receptor antagonists (SCH23390 or SCH39166). A68930 significantly increased phosphorylation of CREB in both 16HBE14o- and NCI-H292 cells, which was attenuated by the inhibitors of PKA (H89) and MEK (U0126). Expression of MUC5AC mRNA and protein were also increased by either dopamine or A68930 in NCI-H292 cells. Conclusions These results suggest that the activation of the dopamine D1 receptor on human airway epithelium could induce mucus overproduction, which could worsen airway obstructive symptoms

The Arab world's contribution to solid waste literature: a bibliometric analysis

BACKGROUND: Environmental and health-related effects of solid waste material are considered worldwide problems. The aim of this study was to assess the volume and impact of Arab scientific output published in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) on solid waste. METHODS: We included all the documents within the SCI whose topic was solid waste from all previous years up to 31 December 2012. In this bibliometric analysis we sought to evaluate research that originated from Arab countries in the field of solid waste, as well as its relative growth rate, collaborative measures, productivity at the institutional level, and the most prolific journals. RESULTS: A total of 382 (2.35 % of the overall global research output in the field of solid waste) documents were retrieved from the Arab countries. The annual number of documents published in the past three decades (1982–2012) indicated that research productivity demonstrated a noticeable rise during the last decade. The highest number of articles associated with solid waste was that of Egypt (22.8 %), followed by Tunisia (19.6), and Jordan (13.4 %). the total number of citations over the analysed years at the date of data collection was 4,097, with an average of 10.7 citations per document. The h-index of the citing articles was 31. Environmental science was the most researched topic, represented by 175 (45.8 %) articles. Waste Management was the top active journal. The study recognized 139 (36.4 %) documents from collaborations with 25 non-Arab countries. Arab authors mainly collaborated with countries in Europe (22.5 %), especially France, followed by countries in the Americas (9.4 %), especially the USA. The most productive institution was the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, with 6.3 % of total publications. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the expected increase in solid waste production from Arab world, research activity about solid waste is still low. Governments must invest more in solid waste research to avoid future unexpected problems. Finally, since solid waste is a multidisciplinary science, research teams in engineering, health, toxicology, environment, geology and others must be formulated to produce research in solid waste from different scientific aspects

Business continuity management in Jordanian banks: Some cultural considerations

This article investigates the extent to which the Jordanian banking sector uses Business Continuity Management (BCM) as a way to manage organizational risk, disasters and crises, as well as business interruptions. The population in this study consists of the 17 Jordanian banks registered with the Amman Stock Exchange. Data were collected via an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Eleven completed questionnaires were obtained, representing a response rate of 64.7 per cent. Questionnaires were followed by three semi-structured interviews conducted with BCM managers from three Jordanian banks from different cultural backgrounds; local, Islamic and foreign. All the respondents have BCM programmes in place. There are no statistically significant differences in the practice of BCM between Jordanian banks in terms of organizational characteristics, such as size and age. However, the cultural backgrounds of the banks and culturally determined differences in their operations more generally have influenced the practice of BCM in significant ways