Arabic is the fourth most widely spoken language in the world, and is characterised by a high rate of inflection. To cater for this, most Arabic information retrieval systems incorporate a stemming stage. Most existing Arabic stemmers are derived from English equivalents; however, unlike English, most affixes in Arabic are difficult to discriminate from the core word. Removing incorrectly ident...

We consider the semantics of prepositions, revisiting a broad-coverage annotation scheme used for annotating all 4,250 preposition tokens in a 55,000 word corpus of English. Attempts to apply the scheme to adpositions and case markers in other languages, as well as some problematic cases in English, have led us to reconsider the assumption that a preposition’s lexical contribution is equivalent...

Data sparsity is one of the main factors that make word sense disambiguation (WSD) difficult. To overcome this problem we need to find effective ways to use resources other than sense labeled data. In this paper I describe a WSD system that uses a statistical language model based on a large unannotated corpus. The model is used to evaluate the likelihood of various substitutes for a word in a g...

Empirical studies suggest that (a) language is grounded in action and (b) that the immediate past history of use influences how humans produce and comprehend spatial prepositions. We put these assumptions to the test by computationally modelling data from a spatial language task. The task required participants to place functionally related/unrelated objects on a screen w.r.t to a spatial prepos...

This work presents an extensive comparison of language related problems for neural machine translation and phrase-based machine translation between German and English. The explored issues are related both to the language characteristics as well as to the machine translation process and, although related, are going beyond typical translation error classes. It is shown that themain advantage of t...

This study is conducted as an attempt to examine the errors in English writings committed by Arab learners who live in Israel. These students were required to write an essay in English. The participants were 22 students, four males and 18 females. For error identifications and categorizations, the researchers developed, based on the Israeli matriculation (Bagrut), and on the literature (Ellis, ...

OBJECTIVE To find out the frequency and type of English Grammar problems in original articles, submitted for publication in Annals of Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, Karachi. STUDY DESIGN Across-sectional study. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY Department of Annals of Abbasi Shaheed Hospital and Karachi Medical and Dental College in January 2015. METHODOLOGY The study evaluated 28 original research a...

THE STUDY of language and the study of literature have been artificially separated for far too long. The origins of the separation can be traced back to classical times, but we have had our fill of it in recent decades, with generations of children being forced to live within the parallel universes of'lang' and 'lit' in school, then moving to the more sophisticated and intellectually challengin...