The speech act of offer in Jordanian arabic: a socio-pragmatic analysis

Offers are widely common speech acts ranging from everyday communications to commercials. They constitute a crucial role in Jordanian culture. However, Jordanian Arabic offers have not been examined in a complex way. In order to address these unanswered problems, the current research work takes a threefold (theoretical, empirical and comparative) perspective. First, the theoretical perspective of the research work focuses on the description of offers based on the former theoretical observations and the empirical research results, then outlines the potential arrangement of offer characteristics based on the two concepts 'salience' and 'performance' from a Jordanian Arabic perspective. The second perspective of the research work involves the empirical investigation of three corpora of Jordanian Arabic offers. In order to carry out the empirical research, data are collected from three different sources: 100 ads extracted from Facebook that were posted by Jordanian agencies of travel and tourism, 100 ads extracted from 'Open Market' website that were posted by individual owners or agents of real estates, and a DCT consisting of 10 situations distributed to 100 Jordanian Arabic citizens. The data composing of the three corpora are analyzed in a qualitative-quantitative method, so data are calculated and tabulated in order to help find all the nuances in the offer strategies along with their linguistic patterns as well as politeness modification strategies. Since the analysis of Jordanian Arabic offers is still very much in its infancy, two linguistic taxonomies are constructed in order to organize the process of the data analysis for both written and spoken offers. The results of the data analysis explore the notable role of the Jordanian culture not only in determining the offer strategy but also in choosing the politeness modification strategy. Direct offers were found to be the most frequently familiar offer strategy in the three corpora. On the one hand, politeness strategies in both corpora of Facebook and Open Market were used differently based on the platform of ads and the offered object. On the other hand, politeness modifications in the spoken corpus were microscopically examined and then detected that the preference of politeness modification strategy draws upon the offeree's socio-cultural variables as age, social status, and gender. As a consequence, the current research offers a challenge to the face-saving model of politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) as it neglected two important variables regarding age and gender through which the degree of politeness can be assessed from a Jordanian Arabic perspective. The third perspective compares the findings concerning written offers to those of spoken offers. The results of the comparison between the three corpora have explored some similarities and differences between the three corpora, which in turn, contribute to arrive at the four principal conclusions of the work: Jordanian Arabic offers are face-enhancing as well as face-threatening acts that are realized either directly or indirectly, Jordanian Arabic direct offers are more popular in use than their indirect counterparts, and politeness in Jordanian Arabic offers is related to the phenomenon of persuasion

Automatic semantic header generator

As the amount of information and the number of Internet users grow, the problem of indexing and retrieval of electronic information resources becomes more critical. The existing search systems tend to generate misses and false hits due to the fact that they attempt to match the specified search terms without context in the target information resource. The COncordia INdexing and DIscovery system is an indexing system. It is a powerful means of helping users locate documents, software, and other types of data among large repositories. In environments that contain many different types of data, content indexing requires type-specific processing to extract information effectively. The Semantic Header, which is proposed by Desai (11), contains the semantic contents of information resources. It provides a useful tool in searching for a document based on a number of commonly used criteria. The information from the semantic header could be used by the search system to help locate appropriate documents with minimum effort. This thesis introduces an automatic tool for the extraction and storage of some of the meta-information in a Semantic Header and an automatic text classification scheme

General public knowledge, perceptions and practice towards pharmaceutical drug advertisements in the Western region of KSA

AbstractThis study aims to examine general public knowledge and behavior toward pharmaceutical advertisements in the Western part of KSA. A cross sectional convenience sampling technique was used in this study. A total of 1445 valid questionnaires were received and analyzed using SPSS version 16 at alpha value of 0.05. Majority of respondents were aware of different types of drugs to be advertised and drug advertisements should seek approval from the health authorities. Television and Internet showed the highest effect on consumers. Almost half of the participants preferred an advertised drug over non-advertised one. Most of the respondents indicated that the quality of frequently advertised drugs is not better than those prescribed by the doctors. Majority of participants had positive beliefs toward advertised drugs concerning their role in education and spreading of awareness among the public. Pharmaceutical advertisements harm the doctor–patient relationship as evidenced by one-third of the investigated sample. Moreover, majority of the participants mentioned that they would consult another doctor or even change the current doctor if he/she refused to prescribe an advertised medication. Results of this study could be used to develop awareness programs for the general public and try to enforce the regulations and policies to protect the general public and patients from the business oriented pharmaceutical companies and drug suppliers

Noise Level Estimation for Digital Images Using Local Statistics and Its Applications to Noise Removal

In this paper, an automatic estimation of additive white Gaussian noise technique is proposed. This technique is built according to the local statistics of Gaussian noise. In the field of digital signal processing, estimation of the noise is considered as pivotal process that many signal processing tasks relies on. The main aim of this paper is to design a patch-based estimation technique in order to estimate the noise level in natural images and use it in blind image removal technique. The estimation processes is utilized selected patches which is most contaminated sub-pixels in the tested images sing principal component analysis (PCA). The performance of the suggested noise level estimation technique is shown its superior to state of the art noise estimation and noise removal algorithms, the proposed algorithm produces the best performance in most cases compared with the investigated techniques in terms of PSNR, IQI and the visual perception

Automatic Semantic Header Generator

As the amount of information and the number of Internet users grow, the problem of indexing and retrieval of electronic information resources becomes more critical. The existing search systems tend to generate misses and false hits due to the fact that they attempt to match the specified search terms without context in the target information resource. The COncordia INdexing and DIscovery system is an indexing system. It is a powerful means of helping users locate documents, software, and other types of data among large repositories. In environments that contain many different types of data, content indexing requires type-specific processing to extract information effectively. The Semantic Header, which is proposed by Desai [11], contains the semantic contents of information resources. It provides a useful tool in searching for a document based on a number of commonly used criteria. The information from the semantic header could be used by the search system to help locate appropriate documents with minimum effort. This paper introduces an automatic tool for the extraction and storage of some of the meta-information in a Semantic Header and an automatic text classification scheme

LOW COST AUTOMATIC SUN PATH TRACKING SYSTEM

Solar tracking systems used are to increase the efficiency of the solar cells have attracted the attention of researchers recently due to the fact that the attention has been directed to the renewable energy sources. Solar tracking systems are of two types, Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) and sun path tracking. Both types are studied briefly in this paper and a simple low cost sun path tracking system is designed using simple commercially available component. Measurements have been made for comparison between fixed and tracking system. The results have shown that the tracking system is effective in the sense of relatively high output power increase and low cost

Automatic Semantic Header Generator

As the mounds of information and the number of Internet users grow, the problem of indexing and retrieving of electronic information resources becomes more critical. The existing search systems tend to generate misses and false hits due to the fact that they attempt to match the speci ed search terms without proper context in the target information resource. In environments that contain many di erent types of data, content indexing requires type- speci c processing to extract indexing information e ectively. The COncordia INdexing and DIscovery (Cindi) system is a system devised to support the registration of indexing meta- data for information resources and provide a convenient system for search and discovery. The Semantic Header, containing the semantic contents of information resources stored in the Cindi system, provides a useful tool to facilitate the searching for documents based on a number of commonly used criteria. This paper presents an automatic tool for the extraction and storage of some of the meta-information in a Semantic Header and the classi cation scheme used for generating the subject headings

Extracting Semantics of Documents Using Semantic Header Generator

Accurate representation of electronic information on the Internet underlies a solid foundation for precise information retrieval. However, the existing search systems tend to generate misses and false hits due to the fact that they attempt to match the specified search terms without context in the target information resource. It is clear that using traditional keywords-based methods for representing semantics of information items has become a major obstacle to high precision. In this paper, we propose the notion of Semantic Header to replace keyword indexing in extracting the meanings of information resources that marks explicitly the logical structure of a document. The information from the Semantic Header could be used by the search system to help locate appropriate documents with minimum effort. We also introduce an automatic tool, called Automatic Semantic Header Generator (ASHG), used for generating the meta-information for some significant fields of Semantic Header