Profiling the news spreading barriers using news headlines

News headlines can be a good data source for detecting the news spreading barriers in news media, which may be useful in many real-world applications. In this paper, we utilize semantic knowledge through the inference-based model COMET and sentiments of news headlines for barrier classification. We consider five barriers including cultural, economic, political, linguistic, and geographical, and different types of news headlines including health, sports, science, recreation, games, homes, society, shopping, computers, and business. To that end, we collect and label the news headlines automatically for the barriers using the metadata of news publishers. Then, we utilize the extracted commonsense inferences and sentiments as features to detect the news spreading barriers. We compare our approach to the classical text classification methods, deep learning, and transformer-based methods. The results show that the proposed approach using inferences-based semantic knowledge and sentiment offers better performance than the usual (the average F1-score of the ten categories improves from 0.41, 0.39, 0.59, and 0.59 to 0.47, 0.55, 0.70, and 0.76 for the cultural, economic, political, and geographical respectively) for classifying the news-spreading barriers.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2304.0816

Political and Economic Patterns in COVID-19 News: From Lockdown to Vaccination

The purpose of this study is to analyse COVID-19 related news published across different geographical places, in order to gain insights in reporting differences. The COVID-19 pandemic had a major outbreak in January 2020 and was followed by different preventive measures, lockdown, and finally by the process of vaccination. To date, more comprehensive analysis of news related to COVID-19 pandemic are missing, especially those which explain what aspects of this pandemic are being reported by newspapers inserted in different economies and belonging to different political alignments. Since LDA is often less coherent when there are news articles published across the world about an event and you look answers for specific queries. It is because of having semantically different content. To address this challenge, we performed pooling of news articles based on information retrieval using TF-IDF score in a data processing step and topic modeling using LDA with combination of 1 to 6 ngrams. We used VADER sentiment analyzer to analyze the differences in sentiments in news articles reported across different geographical places. The novelty of this study is to look at how COVID-19 pandemic was reported by the media, providing a comparison among countries in different political and economic contexts. Our findings suggest that the news reporting by newspapers with different political alignment support the reported content. Also, economic issues reported by newspapers depend on economy of the place where a newspaper resides

Role of Principals' Motivational Strategies and Performance of Elementary Schools Teachers Regarding their Academic Qualification

School heads used techniques of motivation for increasing the performance of teachers in teaching learning process. Head teachers encourage teachers to perform their duties devotedly by using different techniques. This study aimed  to find  the effect of  principals' motivational strategies on the performance of teachers on the basis of  their academic qualifications. All elementary  teachers working in  60 public schools of district Sheikhpura were the population of the study. Six hundred  elementary teachers were selected for sample  by using the technique of cluster random sampling. The study was  conducted to examine the effect of motivational techniques  used by schools'  principals  to develop  performance of  teachers on the basis of  their academic qualification . A   standardized research instrument as questionnaire was comprised of 48 items  from eight  most important techniques of motivation. Data of statistical analysis showed  significant difference  exist among  factors such as appreciation, recognition, performance appraisal, monetary benefits and rewards and  promotion.  It is recommended that heads may offer award and gifts to teachers for developing their  performance in academic activities

OEKG: The Open Event Knowledge Graph

Accessing and understanding contemporary and historical events of global impact such as the US elections and the Olympic Games is a major prerequisite for cross-lingual event analytics that investigate event causes, perception and consequences across country borders. In this paper, we present the Open Event Knowledge Graph (OEKG), a multilingual, event-centric, temporal knowledge graph composed of seven different data sets from multiple application domains, including question answering, entity recommendation and named entity recognition. These data sets are all integrated through an easy-to-use and robust pipeline and by linking to the event-centric knowledge graph EventKG. We describe their common schema and demonstrate the use of the OEKG at the example of three use cases: type-specific image retrieval, hybrid question answering over knowledge graphs and news articles, as well as language-specific event recommendation. The OEKG and its query endpoint are publicly available

Measuring Life Skills of Elementary School Teachers in District Narowal

Life skills are an integral and important component of a successful life of individuals. In order to increase productivity and advancement in life, education must focus on the development and enhancement of potentially up dated life skills in students specially during school years. Teachers can do it efficiently if they have acquired these skills. The aim of the study was to identify life skills of elementary school teachers. The study was quantitative in nature and used survey method. The population of the study was all the elementary school teachers of district Narowal of province Punjab. The sample of the study was 286 elementary school teachers from district Narowal. A questionnaire was developed by the researchers for data collection which contained statements related to life skills i.e. self-awareness, empathy, Interpersonal Relationship Skills, Communication, Critical Thinking, Creative thinking, Decision Making, Problem Solving, Coping with Stress, and Coping with Emotions. Instrument was validated by a pilot study. The reliability index Cronbach alpha was .79. Mean scores and standard deviations were calculated. The findings of the study indicated that teachers have acquired most of the life skills. It is suggested to include practical experiences in prevailing curriculum to develop life skills in students in order to develop life skills in students and oppose rigidity in current education system. Keywords: Life skills, elementary school teacher