Optical Character Recognition of Amharic Documents

In Africa around 2,500 languages are spoken. Some of these languages have their own indigenous scripts. Accordingly, there is a bulk of printed documents available in libraries, information centers, museums and offices. Digitization of these documents enables to harness already available information technologies to local information needs and developments. This paper presents an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for converting digitized documents in local languages. An extensive literature survey reveals that this is the first attempt that report the challenges towards the recognition of indigenous African scripts and a possible solution for Amharic script. Research in the recognition of African indigenous scripts faces major challenges due to (i) the use of large number characters in the writing and (ii) existence of large set of visually similar characters. In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction scheme using principal component and linear discriminant analysis, followed by a decision directed acyclic graph based support vector machine classifier. Recognition results are presented on real-life degraded documents such as books, magazines and newspapers to demonstrate the performance of the recognizer

Amharic Speech Recognition for Speech Translation

International audienceThe state-of-the-art speech translation can be seen as a cascade of Automatic Speech Recognition, Statistical Machine Translation and Text-To-Speech synthesis. In this study an attempt is made to experiment on Amharic speech recognition for Amharic-English speech translation in tourism domain. Since there is no Amharic speech corpus, we developed a read-speech corpus of 7.43hr in tourism domain. The Amharic speech corpus has been recorded after translating standard Basic Traveler Expression Corpus (BTEC) under a normal working environment. In our ASR experiments phoneme and syllable units are used for acoustic models, while morpheme and word are used for language models. Encouraging ASR results are achieved using morpheme-based language models and phoneme-based acoustic models with a recognition accuracy result of 89.1%, 80.9%, 80.6%, and 49.3% at character, morph, word and sentence level respectively. We are now working towards designing Amharic-English speech translation through cascading components under different error correction algorithms

A Systematic Literature Review on Digital Knowledge Sharing in Higher Education

Digital knowledge sharing is a common practice around the world. It can be used by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to maintain education quality. While several studies have been conducted to enable academics to share their knowledge and experiences, there have been few attempts to examine the main motivators of online knowledge sharing in HEI. This research aims to explore the state of the art of knowledge sharing behavior among academics in Higher education to construct a conceptual framework through examining motivators of online knowledge sharing in HEI. To achieve this purpose, a systematic literature review was performed using a variety of journals across several industries, including higher education. A comprehensive literature search did not turn up any articles that explore or test the association between social capital, knowledge sharing, technology, and quality of education improvement in the HEI. Hence, there is a need to conduct further research to improve online knowledge sharing behavior and education quality

Exploring Mechanisms in Tacit Knowledge Externalization: Preliminary Findings from Participatory Agricultural Innovation Practices in Ethiopia

Tacit knowledge is embedded in people’s experiences, expertise, know-how, skills, techniques, insights, judgments, actions or behaviors. This knowledge is a source of innovation that can provide dynamic responses to context specific problems. Effective exploitation and management of tacit knowledge is critical, but the subject of tacit knowledge in general and the process of its externalization and sharing in particular are still relatively unexplored and not fully understood. In addition, the agricultural sector has rarely been the topic of inquiry in research related to tacit knowledge elicitation and most previous studies focus on high tech industries and business organizations. This paper explored what mechanisms are being used to externalize tacit knowledge and what factors impact this process given the context of participatory agricultural research in Ethiopia. We applied a qualitative case study method using an in-depth semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and document analysis as data collection tool

PROPOSING A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (KMS) ARCHITECTURE TO PROMOTE KNOWLEDGE SHARING AMONG EMPLOYEES

Knowledge is a strategic resource for knowledge intensive organizations like commercial banks. However, the use of knowledge as resource depends on an organization´s ability to select, capture, store, disseminate and apply its knowledge resources. This organizational capability is created if the organization undertakes explicit initiatives to establish and sustain a KMS as one of its core business functions. An empirical investigation of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) shows that there is no explicit initiative or responsible unit to manage its knowledge resources. This study uses a design science research method to investigate the problems KM in CBE and propose KMS architecture which is believed, when implemented, to solve current problems. The main theoretical contribution of the study is that it demonstrates how to design a KMS architecture using system analysis and ontology methods. The paper has also implication for practice as it suggests solutions for observed problems and ways to increase CBE´s capability to use its knowledge resources

Investigate knowledge management technology implementation for supporting decision making in Ethiopian health sectors

Introduction: Knowledge management technology is a key tool for facilitating and improving the quality of health care delivery in hospitals. However, the use and implementation of this technology is not an easy task. This study aims to investigate a knowledge management technology implementation and use in Ethiopian hospitals, with a particular reference to Jimma University Specialized Hospital. Methodology: Information about challenges of knowledge management technology implementation was gathered using qualitative research methods, through conducting semi-structured interviews. Purposive sampling method was applied to select fifty-four participants from a well-defined population. Findings were first validated, according to published literature and research works, and then sorted into three main areas, such as current usage of KM technology to enhance and improve decision-making, factors affecting the implementation of KM technology Results: This study revealed that the overall level of KM technology implementation in Jimma University Specialized hospital is still low. Conclusion: Implementation and use of KM technology to improve the quality of hospital health services is needed. Thus, it suggested that hospital managers should make much more effort to develop a strategy and policy on the implementation and use of KM technology so that the hospital could improve the quality of healthcare services

Research in Area of Tacit Knowledge: Literature Review on Tacit Knowledge

Knowledge is one of the valuable resources for organizational success and competitive advantage. The characteristics, types, and usage of knowledge is determining the potential of an organization. The types of knowledge are tacit and explicit. Following deductive research approach this paper presents meta-analysis of the use of tacit knowledge in the transport sector.  The paper investigated and identified the areas and amounts of studies on tacit knowledge integration to show the gap work and the way forward. Even if from 2000 up to 2019 E.C Knowledge Management (KM) researchers published on the average 10.65 publications yearly, however, this literature survey confirmed that there is no publication is found tacit knowledge integration in the transport sector. Keywords: knowledge, knowledge management, tacit knowledge, practical intelligence DOI: 10.7176/IKM/12-4-03 Publication date:June 30th 202

Towards a Scalable and Adaptive Learning Approach for Network Intrusion Detection

This paper introduces a new integrated learning approach towards developing a new network intrusion detection model that is scalable and adaptive nature of learning. The approach can improve the existing trends and difficulties in intrusion detection. An integrated approach of machine learning with knowledge-based system is proposed for intrusion detection. While machine learning algorithm is used to construct a classifier model, knowledge-based system makes the model scalable and adaptive. It is empirically tested with NSL-KDD dataset of 40,558 total instances, by using ten-fold cross validation. Experimental result shows that 99.91% performance is registered after connection. Interestingly, significant knowledge rich learning for intrusion detection differs as a fundamental feature of intrusion detection and prevention techniques. Therefore, security experts are recommended to integrate intrusion detection in their network and computer systems, not only for well-being of their computer systems but also for the sake of improving their working process

Optical Character Recognition of Amharic Documents

Abstract — In Africa around 2,500 languages are spoken. Some of these languages have their own indigenous scripts. Accordingly, there is a bulk of printed documents available in libraries, information centers, museums and offices. Digitization of these documents enables to harness already available information technologies to local information needs and developments. This paper presents an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for converting digitized documents in local languages. An extensive literature survey reveals that this is the first attempt that reports the challenges towards the recognition of indigenous African scripts and a possible solution for Amharic script. Research in the recognition of African indigenous scripts faces major challenges due to (i) the use of large number characters in the writing and (ii) existence of large set of visually similar characters. In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction scheme using principal component and linear discriminant analysis, followed by a decision directed acyclic graph based support vector machine classifier. Recognition results are presented on real-life degraded documents such as books, magazines and newspapers to demonstrate the performance of the recognizer