Review of script displays of African languages by current software

All recorded African languages that have a writing system have orthographies which use the Roman or Arabic scripts, with a few exceptions. Whilst Unicode successfully handles the encoding of both these scripts, current software, in particular web browsers, take little account of users wishing to operate in a minority script. Their use for displaying African languages has been limited by the availability of facilities and the desire to communicate with the ‘world’ through major languages such as English and French. There is a need for more use of the indigenous languages to strengthen their language communities and the use of the local scripts in enhancing the learning, teaching and general use of their own languages by their speaking communities

Automatic hyphenation of afrikaans

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Science University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg for the Degree of M aster of Science November 198

A review of some problems in Computational Linguistics

We have investigated a number of problems in the field of computational linguistics. The position of minority languages on the web is of interest from both cultural and technical aspects, and leads to problems such as the existence of such pages, their penetration within surrounding official languages, and web searching strategies. The use of non-roman scripts yields several areas of enquiry such as OCR, where an engineering approach is needed, the limitations of Unicode that are experienced by some oriental languages, and the approach to tackling a living recent script in Africa. Some work on language morphology has been undertaken, but more remains to be done. This is ongoing, both as a linguistics research target, and for applications in word processing and applied text analysis. We have applied the area of formal grammars to heraldry, and we envisage applications in similar colour- and shape-restricted domains

Attempts at a web presence inventory of African minority languages

Making an inventory of minority languages that have web sites is difficult. We show that, even if we define “minority” as African languages, then this is of little use since the appearance of web sites in any African languages are few. Many African web sites are hosted outside the continent, and few have totally indigenous languages displayed; rather, it contains a mixture of ex-colonial language illustrating documents in the African language concerned. In addition, many countries have more than one official language and much mixing does take place naturally in daily use. Considerable effort is needed to extend this survey, but it is already clear that the empowerment of Africans is being side-lined by this technology

An Inquiry-led Personalised Navigation System (IPNS) using multi-dimensional linkbases

The simplicity of the hypertext model behind the World Wide Web is a factor in its success, but this simplicity brings limitations. One of these limitations is embedding links in documents. Open Hypermedia addresses this by instead storing them in separate link databases. Meanwhile, the Adaptive Hypermedia approach seeks to enhance a user’s experience by inserting personalised additional content and links on the web page. However, these techniques do not offer the user any control over the adaptation. In this paper, we propose the concept of a multi-dimensional linkbase for adaptive links presentation. Links are created and stored in a single, multi-dimensional, linkbase that provides presentation links based on the user’s preferences and profile. We present a web-based system (IPNS) that implements this multi-dimensional concept for controlling its personalisation of hyperlinks. We give the results of our evaluation, which confirm that user-controlled adaptation is a satisfactory approach to providing users with control over personalization, and can alleviate the link overload problem

Review of script displays of African languages by current software

All recorded African languages that have a writing system have orthographies which use the Roman or Arabic scripts, with a few exceptions. While Unicode successfully handles the encoding of both these scripts, current software, in particular Web browsers, take little account of users wishing to operate in a minority script. Their use for displaying African languages has been limited by the availability of facilities and the desire to communicate with the ‘world ’ through major languages such as English and French. There is a need for more use of the indigenous languages to strengthen their language communities and the use of the local scripts in enhancing the learning, teaching, and general use of their own languages by their speaking communities. 1

Keynote Address: Is it Right and is it Legal?

Should the rules for IT practitioners be the same as are self-imposed by society in general, or something extra? Engineers, and in particular IT professionals, are being called on to take more and more consideration of non-technical factors when designing their systems. Every system they design is meant to be used (ultimately) by people, and yet people are very diverse and work in unexpected ways. We see this in the manager’s role in dealing with his employees, where he now has to cater for their safety, recruitment terms, and what facilities they can and cannot use within the business, for example private e-mail. Information technology itself provides new problems, such as zombies, spam and identity theft. Most importantly, businesses now accumulate vast quantities of digital personal data on their customers. Who is to say how they may or may not use this? Does the IT professional not have a say in what is right, even what is legal? The solutions to this have to be worldwide, and yet most of us can only create a local effect. The best place for an academic to start is in training the future engineers. The paper outlines the background thinking to a Professional & Legal Issues course, given to all second year students of Information Systems, Electronics, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science, at the University of Southampton, UK

The Dynamic Review Journal: a scholarly archive

A digital archive, together with its users and its contents, does not exist in isolation - there is a cycle of activity which provides the context for the archive's existence, and which the archive supports through its various roles of information access, discovery, storage, dissemination and preservation. This paper describes an extended digital library environment that we have developed for orthopaedic surgeons which assists in collating and analysing patient data, organising internal project discussions, and producing articles. By bridging the gap between the undertaking of experimental work (surgical trials) and the dissemination of its results through electronic publication, this work addresses the cycle of activity in which a digital archive rests

Practical Guidance on Automated Essay-type Assessment Feedback

We describe our experiences of returning marked material to students over several years. From a purely paper-based process, we progressed through various incarnations of electronic hand in and return, but we are still not satisfied that the facilities available to the typical lecturer are really useful in this context. Workarounds still have to be employed, but recent versions of VLEs have given us a glimmer of hope