Patterns of Verb Complementation in Pakistani English

The purpose of this study was to investigate the verb complementation patterns, and their frequencies and distributions, in Pakistani English. The data has been taken from The Pakistani Written English (PWE), comprising a sample of 1,867 sentences taken randomly but proportionately from different sentence categories formed on the basis of number of words. The PWE is a corpus of written Pakistani English having 29 different written text categories, 1,477 files, and 2,119,626 words. Keeping in mind the different verb complementation patterns mentioned by Greenbaum and Quirk (1990), Quirk et al. (1972 and 1985) and Greenbaum (1995), the researcher has manually analyzed the complementation patterns of all the verbs in the data and then calculated each pattern’s frequency and distribution. The findings reveal that Pakistani English uses various verb complementation patterns and that certain patterns are used much more frequently than the others. It was concluded that, as is the nature of language, Pakistani English has internal variations according to the local cultural values, and has also external variations if the findings are compared with the same as explored by Altenberg (1993) in the British English. Keywords: corpus, verb complementatio

Alt-Index: A proposed Index for measuring the social activity of scientific research

Altmetrics is a broad term used to refer to article level metrics, which focus on a more timely measurement of interest in scholarly documents made visible through social media (Priem et al., 2010). As with any new metric, concerns have been raised regarding its use (Prime, 2013; Kwok, 2013), due to the fact that an Altmetric score might potentially be manipulated or gamed, just as it is possible to game citations (Bartneck & Kokkelmans, 2011; Wilhite et al., 2012). However, given that there are so many diverse measures now compiled within Altmetrics, the tampering process is actually not that easy (Piwowar, 2013). Altmetric scores have therefore attracted the attention of the scientific community, who, parallel to traditional forms of scholarly communication, are now relying on social media to disseminate research as part of their daily practices (Piwowar, 2013). Thus far, a few studies have shown weak to medium correlations between bibliometric measures and Altmetric scores (Costas et al., 2015). More recently, a comprehensive study using data from Altmetic.com and Scopus has shown that when compared to journal citation scores, Altmetric scores demonstrate a higher-level of accuracy for identifying highly cited publications (Hassan et al., 2017). With this paper, we would like to propose a new measure, termed the alt-index. It is analogous to the h-index (Hirsch 2005), and it is defined as follows: "a scholar has an alt-index of a, if a of her/his Np papers have at least a social mentions, and the other (Np-a) papers have no more than a mentions each"

Meta Analysis of Smartphone Usage for Gratifications Obtained (2016-2019)

Smartphone is mostly used medium today in all age groups. Current study contributes by analyzing the research methodology in context of smartphone usage studies. The population of the study is the “Uses and Gratifications” researches related to smartphone usage published between 2016 and 2019. The research articles were selected by the key words of “smartphone AND gratifications” on Google Scholar and 25 articles were selected for meta-analysis to explore the objectives of approach to uses and gratifications theory, the sampling procedures, the data collection and analyses in the previous studies. It is found that smartphone is a multidimensional construct and scholars have researched them by using the holistic and the reductionist approaches. 64% studies have been found to utilize the quantitative approaches. Both mediated and offline methods are used for data collection in the previous studies. Most of the studies have used survey method. It is recommended to use the validated scales in the context of Pakistani culture

Urdu AI: writeprints for Urdu authorship identification

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by ACM in ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing on 31/10/2021, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3476467 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.The authorship identification task aims at identifying the original author of an anonymous text sample from a set of candidate authors. It has several application domains such as digital text forensics and information retrieval. These application domains are not limited to a specific language. However, most of the authorship identification studies are focused on English and limited attention has been paid to Urdu. On the other hand, existing Urdu authorship identification solutions drop accuracy as the number of training samples per candidate author reduces, and when the number of candidate author increases. Consequently, these solutions are inapplicable to real-world cases. To overcome these limitations, we formulate a stylometric feature space. Based on this feature space we use an authorship identification solution that transforms each text sample into point set, retrieves candidate text samples, and relies the nearest neighbour classifier to predict the original author of the anonymous text sample. To evaluate our method, we create a significantly larger corpus than existing studies and conduct several experimental studies which show that our solution can overcome the limitations of existing studies and report an accuracy level of 94.03%, which is higher than all previous authorship identification works

Optimized production of tannase and gallic acid from fruit seeds by solid state fermentation

Purpose: To investigate the possibility for gallic acid production from different tannin-rich fruit seeds using Aspergillus oryzae via solid-state fermentation. Methods: Fruit seeds of apple, guava, tamarind, black plum and watermelon were analyzed to estimate the synthesis of an enzyme tannase and its product gallic acid. Various physicochemical parameters were optimized to increase the gallic acid yield. Gallic acid was extracted by Soxhlet apparatus and identified by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). It was quantitatively determined by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Results: Amongst the various substrates tested, black plum seeds gave the highest activity of 34.40 U/g for tannase and 16.66 mg/g for gallic acid under optimized physicochemical conditions, i.e., 1:3 substrate: moisture ratio, 30 °C, 96 h incubation period and pH 5.5. Addition of carbon source had a negative effect on production while ammonium sulphate (0.2 %) as nitrogen source increased the yield of both products. The gallic acid produced was 98.5 % pure, compared to the standard. Conclusion: Production of tannase and gallic acid via solid-state fermentation conditions has been optimized in vitro. The optimized conditions can be utilized on a commercial scale for economically viable production of gallic acid

Measuring Social Media Activity of Scientific Literature: An Exhaustive Comparison of Scopus and Novel Altmetrics Big Data

This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is comprehensively evaluated by deploying Area Under the Curve (AUC) - an application of receiver operating characteristic. Results indicate a rapid increase in the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database from 10.19% in 2011 to 20.46% in 2015. A zero-truncated negative binomial model is implemented to measure the extent to which different bibliometric and altmetric factors contribute to citation counts. Blog count appears to be the most important factor increasing the number of citations by 38.6% in the field of Health Professions and Nursing, followed by Twitter count increasing the number of citations by 8% in the field of Physics and Astronomy. Interestingly, both Blog count and Twitter count always show positive increase in the number of citations across all fields. While there was a positive weak correlation between bibliometric and altmetric indices, the results show that altmetric indices can be a good indicator to discriminate highly cited publications, with an encouragingly AUC= 0.725 between highly cited publications and total altmetric count. Overall, findings suggest that altmetrics could better distinguish highly cited publications.Comment: 34 Pages, 3 Figures, 15 Table

Analysis of Pre and Post Merger and Acquisition Financial Performance of Banks in Pakistan

Merger and Acquisition is a strategy adopted by the organizations globally to meet the needs of dynamic business environment. This strategy also has much importance in Pakistan mostly in banking sector. Therefore, the objective of the study is to assess the impact of M&A on the financial performance of banks in Pakistan. The accounting and financial data of 10 banks were used in this study. Data was taken from the financial statement analysis (FSA) by State Bank of Pakistan from the period of 20062011. For the analysis of pre and post Merger and Acquisition performance 15 financial ratios were used in the study. To compare the results Paired sample t-Test was used to measure the significant difference between pre and post M&A financial performance. The overall results show that there is no significant difference in financial performance. It is concluded that there is insignificant difference between pre and post M&A performance of banks in Pakistan

Antiulcerogenic Activity of Vitamin E on Gastric Ulcers produced by Indomethacin

Objective: To study the morphological and histological effects of vitamin E on gastric lesions produced by indomethacin.Materials and Methods: This was an animal interventional study, 48 adult healthy albino mice were selected and were split into four groups A, B, C and D. Number of animals in each group was 12. Group A was categorized as control. Evion 400mg/kg was administered to Group B. Indocid 25mg/kg was given to group C. Indocid and Evion both (25mg/kg &400 mg/kg respectively) were administered to Group D. In all group, six animals were selected and treated for three days and rest for eight days with calculated doses of drugs. Mice were sacrificed and dissection was done 24 hours after the last dose. The stomach was identified, washed, and observed under dissecting microscope to study the number and shape of ulcers. The dimension of ulcers was measured under a compound microscope.Results: No ulcers were seen in groups A and B. 35 and 10 ulcers were observed in groups C and D respectively. The mean number of ulcers in groups C and D was statistically significant (p-value=0.000). In comparison to group D, Pindot, linear, Irregular, and punched-out ulcers were more prevalent in group C and were statistically significant (p-value < 0.05). The mean linear dimension of ulcers in group C was much greater than in group D. The mean dimension of ulcers in group C1 and C2 was 262.50µm and 232.5µm respectively. Whereas in group D1 and D2 given both Indocid and vitamin E the dimensions were 56.5µm and 50µm.Conclusion: Vitamin E has an anti-ulcerogenic effect on stomach mucosa by reducing the number and dimension of ulcers