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Research on voice recognition for African languages is limited due to the scarcity of digital resources for training and adaptation, despite its broad usefulness. The Hausa language, spoken by almost fifty million inhabitants in West and Central Africa, is an example of a linguistic domain that has not been thoroughly studied. The Hausa language employs diacritics, which are symbols located above alphabetical characters to convey further information. By removing diacritics, the number of homographs increases, making it difficult to distinguish between similar words. This paper presents a study on speech recognition in the Hausa Language, specifically focusing on diacritized words. The study utilises the state-of-the-art wave2vec2.0 and Whisper deep learning architecture models, for transcribing audio signals into corresponding Hausa text. According to the results obtained in the study, the Whisper-large deep model emerged as the best, achieving a word error rate of 4.23% representing a considerable improvement of 43.9% when compared to the existing state-of-the-art model for Hausa language speech recognition. Additionally, the Whsiper-large model demonstrated a diacritic coverage of 92%, precision of 98.87%, with a diacritic error rate of 2.1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short note outlines changes to three of the diacritics on the extIPA chart and provides an updated version of the entire chart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a quantitative study of the registration of diacritics in Hungarian, Spanish, Vietnamese and Turkish family names in the official Swedish population records. Out of the examined diacritics, vowels with accents and the Turkish letter are registered in up to 21 % of the cases, whereas the Turkish letter is registered in over 90 % of the occurrences. Parts of a bigger interview study is also presented, where informants share their views of diacritics in the Swedish population records.

The purpose of the study was to examine the efficacy of lexical stress diacritics on the English comprehensibility and accentedness of Korean speakers. To this end, 30 native Korean participants read aloud 15 English sentences without diacritics in the pretest. Then, they were given explicit instructions on the production of higher pitch and extended duration as a marker of English stress with musical notation provided. In the posttest, the participants read aloud the same sentences as were in the pretest but which had diacritics indicating stress placement. In the delayed posttest, two days after the pretest and the posttest, the participants read 15 sentences without diacritics again to see if the effects of the treatment were retained. Randomized speech samples were rated by three native speakers of English in relation to comprehensibility and accentedness. Findings showed that significant improvements were observed after the treatment in both comprehensibility and accentedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Umm Al-Qura University Journal for Languages & Literature is the property of Association of Arab Universities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The author of the article considers the development of the differentiating function of the apostrof (apostrophe), which is realized in the contemporary Church Slavonic language in the pronominal paradigm. The comparison of facts in grammars and old-printed editions shows that the application of apostrophe-dissimilator was not presupposed by the Grammar of 1648, and appeared in the course of the work of the Moscow Print Yard correctors (from the Service Book of 1655). It first appeared in the forms yazhe, izhe with the support of productive forms (ya, i), then it spread to the forms im, imzhe (by external analogy with other forms of DatPl) and further to the rest of the pronominal homoforms (by internal analogy). The development of this spelling innovation was consistently reflected in the Moscow editions of the second half of the 17 th century up to its stage-by-stage codification in grammars of 1721, 1723, 1725 and 1733. The pronominal nature of the apostrophe-dissimilator predetermined the limitations in its functioning; however, the acquisition of a differentiating function became a necessary stage in the formation of the system of antistih (anti-verse) in its modern form. The expansion of apostrophe functioning, which has a precedent in the Grammar by F. Maximov (1723), may contribute to the logical completion of this formation. Also, the obtained data on the development of the apostrof (apostrophe) differentiating function can be used to identify Moscow editions along with other innovations, introduced in the period of the Nikon’s correctors work.

Because of the great development that took place in information transfer and communication technologies, the issue of information transfer security has become a very sensitive and resonant issue, great importance must be given to protecting this confidential information. Steganography is one of the important and effective ways to protect the security of this information while it is being transmitted through the Internet, steganography is a technology to hide information inside an unnoticeable envelope object that can be an image, video, text or sound. The Arabic language has some special features that make it excellent covers to hide information from Through the diversity of the Arabic letters from dotted letters in several forms or vowels or special letters, the Holy Qur’an is considered a cover rich in movements and Arabic grammar, which makes it a wide cover for the purpose of concealing information. The Holy Qur’an is a sacred book where it is not permissible to modify, add or move any of the letters or any diacritical mark to it. The algorithm hides the two bits by uses six special letters of Arabic language. Moreover, it checks for the presence of specific Arabic linguistic features referred Arabic diacritics. The proposed system achieved a high ability to hide as in Surat Al-Baqarah (4524 bits) and also (2576 bits) in Surat Al-Imran and in Surat Al-An’am (2318 bits).

This paper explores The aspects of public life accompanying the Islamic community during the mid-20th century by studying some tombstones Models and how they relate to the accounts of contemporary historical records. This dealt with study and publication of some tombstones Models from Kirklar Cemetery and how to identify their written content and decorative elements, then turns to indicate symbolic, functional and formal Significancs.This paper also accompanies the reuse of tombstones located in Islamic cemeteries and their exploitation in re-history, followed by the study of the epigraphic inscriptions and decorative elements and their identification of their importance, symbolic connotations, religious purpose, and social role on the tombstones and keeping pace with the period of Russian annexation in the East Caucasus to the Federation. This study is divided into two parts: the descriptive study of (4) tombstones models. Analytical study of the general style compared to the early Islamic and in the middle Ages, with an exploration of artistic treatments, and the formation of artistic analysis of written elements and decorative contents, in addition to identifying the symbolic significance of the use of decorations, slogans and colors in revealing the aspects surrounding the Islamic society in the East Caucasus at the time. Then followed by a study of Arabic calligraphy development’s, letter‘s shapes, then create a historical record of the names, titles and nicknames and using them in classifying the general features of the tombstone models of in that period with some examples of illustrations and manual shape dumps,The search is appended with a conclusion with the most important results

Diacritical marks are strongly present and frequently used in many spellings of the world's languages. Their main functions are phonological and prosodic, and can eventually become identity and semiotic markers as well. This study examines the tilde of Spanish grapheme <ñ> in current commodified language use to convey the Pan-Hispanic ideology. The diachronic and diatopic development of Pan-Hispanism in Spanish-speaking communities is analyzed, examining from a semiotic perspective the presence of the tilde in four logomarks of relevant Pan-Hispanic institutions and events. Findings of interviews with the creators of the brand logo and an in-depth study of the sociocultural, political and economic aspects of the organizations represented, indicate that social practices related to Pan-Hispanism could be associated and emblematized by the tilde in visual branding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the great development that took place in information transfer and communication technologies, the issue of information transfer security has become a very sensitive and resonant issue, great importance must be given to protecting this confidential information. Steganography is one of the important and effective ways to protect the security of this information while it is being transmitted through the Internet, steganography is a technology to hide information inside an unnoticeable envelope object that can be an image, video, text or sound. The Arabic language has some special features that make it excellent covers to hide information from Through the diversity of the Arabic letters from dotted letters in several forms or vowels or special letters, the Holy Qur'an is considered a cover rich in movements and Arabic grammar, which makes it a wide cover for the purpose of concealing information. The Holy Qur'an is a sacred book where it is not permissible to modify, add or move any of the letters or any diacritical mark to it. The algorithm hides the two bits by uses six special letters of Arabic language. Moreover, it checks for the presence of specific Arabic linguistic features referred Arabic diacritics. The proposed system achieved a high ability to hide as in Surat Al-Baqarah (4524 bits) and also (2576 bits) in Surat Al-Imran and in Surat Al-An'am (2318 bits). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Recent research has reported that adding non-existent diacritical marks to a word produces a minimal reading cost compared to the intact word. Here we examined whether this minimal reading cost is due to: (1) the resilience of letter detectors to the perceptual noise (i.e., the cost should be small and comparable for words and nonwords) or (2) top-down lexical processes that normalize the percept for words (i.e., the cost would be larger for nonwords). Methods: We designed a letter detection experiment in which a target stimulus (either a word or a nonword) was presented intact or with extra non-existent diacritics [e.g., amigo (friend) vs. ãmîgô; agimo vs. ãgîmô]. Participants had to decide which of two letters was in the stimulus (e.g., A vs. U). Results: Although the task involved lexical processing, with responses being faster and more accurate for words compared to nonwords, we found only a minimal advantage in error rates for intact stimuli versus those with non-existent diacritics. This advantage was similar for both words and nonwords. Discussion: The letter detectors in the word recognition system appear to be resilient to non-existent diacritics without the need for feedback from higher levels of processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent masked priming studies investigating the recognition of letters with diacritics with native readers of the script have consistently yielded an asymmetric pattern of priming such that a base-letter prime without the diacritic speeds up the recognition of the letter with a diacritic almost as much as an identity prime, but not vice versa (e.g., á–Á ≦ a–Á, but a–A ≪á–A). Here we tested English readers unfamiliar with diacritics in a letter match task using Japanese kana and the vowel letters of the Latin alphabet, and found the asymmetry was reduced to a negligible level (á–Á ≦ a–Á, and a–A ≦ á–A) (Experiments 1 and 2). However, the diacritic novices showed the asymmetric pattern of priming like the diacritic experts when the task condition explicitly required the letters with and without diacritics to be distinguished (Experiments 3 and 4). These results are explained in terms of how expertise moderates an early letter identification process in interpreting a visual feature as noise, or a signal diagnostic of letter identity. Public Significance Statement: English readers with no experience with diacritics were tested in four masked priming letter identification experiments using letters with and without diacritics in both Japanese kana and Latin script. The absence of diacritic in the prime (e.g., a) consistently had little impact on the recognition of the diacriticked letter (Á). Whether the presence of diacritic in the prime (e.g., á) interfered with the identification of the letter without a diacritic (e.g., A) depended on whether they are critical for performing the experimental task. Early letter identification is a dynamic process of interpreting a visual feature as noise or a signal that changes with expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IntroductionRecent research has reported that adding non-existent diacritical marks to a word produces a minimal reading cost compared to the intact word. Here we examined whether this minimal reading cost is due to: (1) the resilience of letter detectors to the perceptual noise (i.e., the cost should be small and comparable for words and nonwords) or (2) top-down lexical processes that normalize the percept for words (i.e., the cost would be larger for nonwords).MethodsWe designed a letter detection experiment in which a target stimulus (either a word or a nonword) was presented intact or with extra non-existent diacritics [e.g., amigo (friend) vs. ãmîgô; agimo vs. ãgîmô]. Participants had to decide which of two letters was in the stimulus (e.g., A vs. U).ResultsAlthough the task involved lexical processing, with responses being faster and more accurate for words compared to nonwords, we found only a minimal advantage in error rates for intact stimuli versus those with non-existent diacritics. This advantage was similar for both words and nonwords.DiscussionThe letter detectors in the word recognition system appear to be resilient to non-existent diacritics without the need for feedback from higher levels of processing.

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental information (e.g., lexical stress, as in cámara ['ka.ma.ɾa] camera; Spanish), but "no" in languages where diacritics indicate segmental information such as a different phoneme (e.g., the German vowels ä/ɛ/and a/a/). Here we examined this issue in French, a language that contains a complex set of diacritical vowels (e.g., for the letter e: é, è, ê, and ë). In Experiment 1, using a semantic categorization task, we compared the word identification times to intact diacritical words (e.g., chèvre, goat in English) with a condition with omitted diacritics (chevre). Results showed that the two conditions behaved similarly. In Experiments 2-4, we compared the intact diacritical words with a condition containing a mismatching diacritic, either existing in French (e.g., chévre, chêvre) or not (the macron sign, as in chēvre). We only found a reading cost when replacing the diacritic with an existing one. In Experiments 5-6, we compared the semantic categorization times to intact nondiacritical words (e.g., cheval, horse in English) versus a condition with an added diacritic, either existing (chèval) or not (chēval). We found a reading cost for the words with the added diacritical mark in both cases. We discuss how models of visual-word recognition can be modified to represent diacritical vowels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arabic is reported as one of the top ten languages taught in U.S. higher education institutions (Looney & Lusin, 2019; Ryding, 2018). This underscores the importance of establishing more elaborate and extensive research in Arabic second language acquisition (ASLA). Theories on input, intake, interaction, feedback, vocabulary processing, and learner cognition need to be redefined to serve Arabic-specific purposes; otherwise, Arabic teaching practice will continue to be informed by Western language paradigms (Ryding & Allen, 2013). In this paper, we propose several research tasks focusing on reading and vocabulary research in Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) to bridge the gap between research in ASLA and pedagogy. Through highlighting some pressing challenges reported by Arabic learners and teachers, we provide an overview of published research motivated by the given challenges.

• Masked priming of letters with and without diacritics shows an asymmetric pattern. • Diacriticked primes impede recognition of non-diacriticked same glyph letters but not vice versa. • Obligatory diacritic marks in Arabic show this asymmetric pattern of priming. • Optional diacritics in Arabic, in contrast, are effectively "ignored" • Letter identification is a recovery of a signal transmitted via a noisy channel. Much recent research on the front end of visual word recognition has focused on how letters with and without diacritic marks are identified. In this study we report three masked priming letter match experiments which examine the processing of two types of diacritic marks in Arabic, a language/writing system rich in diacritics. Experiment 1 focused on diacritic dots that are obligatory and signal a phonemic contrast in consonants. The results showed an oft-replicated asymmetric diacritic priming pattern, namely, that for a target letter with a diacritic (e.g., ش, /$/), the prime without the diacritic (e.g., س, /s/) facilitated recognition almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., ش–ش= س–ش).; in contrast, a target without a diacritic is primed less strongly by the prime with the diacritic than by the identity prime (e.g., س–س < ش–س). Experiment 2 used vowel diacritics which also signal a phonemic contrast when present and collectively play the role of a morpheme, but are not obligatory and appear only in text for children or in the Quran. The results revealed a novel pattern in which both target letters with (e.g., سَ, /sa/) and without (e.g., س, /s/) vowel diacritics were equally facilitated by identity and related primes (e.g., س–سَ = سَ–سَ and سَ–س = س–س). Experiment 3 replicated these effects using a within-participant design. These results are discussed in light of current views of letter and diacritic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extraction of text lines from document images is a critical step in optical character recognition. It is still considered an open document analysis problem. The presence of numerous font variations, diacritics, overlapping, and touching text-lines presents a challenge to algorithms designed for machine-printed text. In this paper, we present a simple and robust text-line extraction algorithm for printed Arabic text. The presented method is divided into two stages: preprocessing and text-line extraction. It extracts text-lines efficiently, even in small font sizes, by utilizing baselines, projection profiles, and a top-down divide and conquer technique. The presented method is fast and efficient when dealing with non-uniform inter-line spacing and the text-line overlapping problem. A set of experiments were conducted on the collected dataset. The experiments revealed that the proposed method outperforms two baseline approaches, with an average error rate of 3% on Arabic text without diacritics and 11% on Arabic text with diacritics. Furthermore, the experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a simple computational running time, with an average running time of 0.087 s per document image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has indicated that second-language learners have difficulty producing geminates accurately. Previous studies have also shown an effect of orthography on second-language speech production. We tested whether the existence of a contrast in the first language phonology for length aids the second-language production of the same contrast. Furthermore, we examined the effect of exposure to orthographic input on geminate consonant production in a cross-script context. We tested the production of Arabic geminate-singleton stop consonants [/bː/-/b/, /tː/-/t/, /dː/-/d/, and /kː/-/k/], a nasal stop consonant /mː/-/m/, and an emphatic stop consonant /tˤː/-/tˤ/, as well as the effect of the diacritic used in Arabic to mark gemination in a delayed imitation task and two reading tasks (ortho-with diacritics and ortho-without diacritics). A comparison of the productions of advanced Japanese-speaking learners, English-speaking learners, and an Arabic control group showed that both learner groups were able to produce Arabic geminate stops; however, the Japanese-speaking learners exhibited an advantage over the English-speaking learners in the auditory-only task and in the presence of diacritics, highlighting the fact that orthographic effects may occur in some cross-script contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which the diacritic layer (taškīl) of the Arabic writing system is employed in modern typeset text differs considerably between genres and individual texts, with many in-between forms not aptly captured by the traditional binary categories of "vowelled" and "unvowelled" text. This article is the first to present a theoretical account of this variation applicable to modern typeset Standard Arabic. It is suggested that diacritics serve three basic functions: facilitation of reading comprehension; facilitation of prescriptively correct diction; and to evoke associations with other texts. Six modes of diacritization in modern typeset text are identified and related to data on rates of diacritization from a corpus of electronically published books. Further lines of research based on this framework are suggested. Résumé: La façon dans laquelle la vocalisation (taškīl) du système d'écriture arabe est utilisée dans les textes modernes diffère sensiblement entre les genres et les textes, avec de nombreuses formes intermédiaires qui ne sont pas adéquatement décrites par les catégories traditionnelles binaires de texte « vocalisé » et « non vocalisé ». Cet article est le premier à présenter un cadre théorique de cette variation qui soit applicable à l'arabe standard moderne. Il suggère que les signes diacritiques (au sens large, incluant aussi le taškīl) remplissent trois fonctions de base : faciliter la compréhension de la lecture, faciliter une diction formellement correcte et évoquer des associations avec d'autres textes. Six modes de diacritisation dans les textes modernes sont identifiés et mis en relation avec des données sur les taux de diacritisation provenant d'un corpus de livres publiés électroniquement. Il introduit enfin d'autres pistes de recherche s'appuyant sur ce cadre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the fast pace of life and online communications and the prevalence of English and the QWERTY keyboard, people tend to forgo using diacritics, make typographical errors (typos) when typing in other languages. Restoring diacritics and correcting spelling is important for proper language use and the disambiguation of texts for both humans and downstream algorithms. However, both of these problems are typically addressed separately: the state-of-the-art diacritics restoration methods do not tolerate other typos, but classical spellcheckers also cannot deal adequately with all the diacritics missing.In this work, we tackle both problems at once by employing the newly-developed universal ByT5 byte-level seq2seq transformer model that requires no language-specific model structures. For a comparison, we perform diacritics restoration on benchmark datasets of 12 languages, with the addition of Lithuanian. The experimental investigation proves that our approach is able to achieve results (>98%) comparable to the previous state-of-the-art, despite being trained less and on fewer data. Our approach is also able to restore diacritics in words not seen during training with >76% accuracy. Our simultaneous diacritics restoration and typos correction approach reaches >94% alpha-word accuracy on the 13 languages. It has no direct competitors and strongly outperforms classical spell-checking or dictionary-based approaches. We also demonstrate all the accuracies to further improve with more training. Taken together, this shows the great real-world application potential of our suggested methods to more data, languages, and error classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Purpose: Researchers studied the needs of family members using different tools particularly the Critical Care Family Needs Inventory (CCFNI). The purpose of current study was to validate the Arabic version of the CCFNI. Methods: A jury of experts helped establish content validity of best translated version. Live testing of the revised instrument with a sample of nurses and family members helped ensure its validity and internal consistency reliability. Results: The Content Validity Index indicated an acceptable relevancy and clarity of the translated version. After introducing diacritic to wordings, clarity and readability were ensured by a pilot test with a sample of 22 critical care nurses and 21 family members. Live testing the instrument asserted its discriminant validity where family members (n = 227) ranked total needs higher than nurses (n = 217) (t = 124.2 (df = 442), p <.001). Conclusion: After using of diacritics, the new modified Arabic version can be used confidently as a valid and reliable measure of family needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has often been assumed that there is, or should be, a one-to-one correspondence between graphs and linguistic units in writing systems as the norm. This is not merely doubtful in terms of descriptive accuracy. Conceptualizing writing systems in such a way also has profound consequences for the application of typological categories to specific cases. In this paper we first suggest a working definition of polygraphy, also touching upon its demarcation from adjacent concepts such as ligatures and diacritics. Having demonstrated that polygraphy is in fact fundamental to a significant number of typologically diverse writing systems, we argue in favor of a typology of writing systems taking the ubiquity of polygraphy into due account, with definitions going beyond one-to-one correspondences as the default. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are letters with a diacritic (e.g., â) recognized as a variant of the base letter (e.g., a), or as a separate letter identity? Two recent masked priming studies, one in French and one in Spanish, investigated this question, concluding that this depends on the language-specific linguistic function served by the diacritic. Experiment 1 tested this linguistic function hypothesis using Japanese kana, in which diacritics signal consonant voicing, and like French and unlike Spanish, provide lexical contrast. Contrary to the hypothesis, Japanese kana yielded the pattern of diacritic priming like Spanish. Specifically, for a target kana with a diacritic (e.g., ガ, /ga/), the kana prime without the diacritic (e.g., カ, /ka/) facilitated recognition almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., ガ–ガ = カ–ガ), whereas for a target kana without a diacritic, the kana prime with the diacritic produced less facilitation than the identity prime (e.g., カ–カ < ガ–カ). We suggest that the pattern of diacritic priming has little to do with linguistic function, and instead it stems from a general property of visual object recognition. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis using visually similar letters of the Latin alphabet that differ in the presence/absence of a visual feature (e.g., O and Q). The same asymmetry in priming was observed. These findings are consistent with the noisy channel model of letter/word recognition (Norris & Kinoshita, Psychological Review, 119, 517–545, 2012a). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zarqa Journal for Research & Studies in Humanities is the property of Zarqa Journal for Research & Studies in Humanities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article compares the different styles in which an Atheist movement in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and a community of Twelver-Shia Muslims in Hyderabad, the capital city of Telangana, engage with emotions of heroism and grief respectively. Heroism and grief are not approached as clearly defined or 'felt' mental entities but as complex compounds of diverse feelings and affective dynamics, which are inseparably entangled with the intellectual, social, material, and historical dimensions of specific practical projects: a quest for a fundamental and holistic transformation of society in the case of Atheist activists and the cultivation of a morally upright and pious life in accordance with the way of Islam in the case of Twelver-Shias. By mobilizing the concept of emotional style as a diacritical and comparative category, the aim is not to compare grief and heroism as either mutually exclusive or commensurable in any direct or essentialist sense; instead, my aim is to juxtapose two condensed ethnographic accounts in order to rethink the role of emotions for describing the historical and contingent production of differences between the secular and the religious within concrete practical and political contexts. The article focuses in particular on how controversial debates among Atheists and Twelver-Shias around the nature and appropriate expression of emotions – as well as the varying understandings and practices of critique implied in these debates – function as a means for the two communities to both construct and contest their boundaries as minorities within a shared discursive environment of religious nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The brain localization debate of lexical tone processing concerns functional hypothesis that lexical tone, owing to its strong linguistic features, is dominant in the left hemisphere, and acoustic hypothesis that all pitch patterns, including lexical tone, are dominant in the right hemisphere due to their acoustic features. Lexical tone as a complex signal contains acoustic components that carry linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic information. To examine these two hypotheses, the current study adopted triplet stimuli including Chinese characters, their corresponding pinyin with a diacritic, and the four diacritics representing Chinese lexical tones. The stimuli represent the variation of lexical tone for its linguistic and acoustic features. The results of a listening task by Mandarin Chinese speakers with and without aphasia support the functional hypothesis that pitch patterns are lateralized to different hemispheres of the brain depending on their functions, with lexical tone to the left hemisphere as a function of linguistic features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have achieved huge popularity in solving problems in image analysis and in text recognition. In this work, we assess the effectiveness of CNN-based architectures where a network is trained in recognizing handwritten characters based on Latin script. European languages such as Dutch, French, German, etc., use different variants of the Latin script, so in the conducted research, the Latin alphabet was extended by certain characters with diacritics used in Polish language. To evaluate the recognition results under the same conditions, a handwritten Latin dataset was also developed. The proposed CNN architecture produced an accuracy of 96% for the extended character set. This is comparable to state-of-the-art results found in the domain of identifying handwritten characters. The presented approach extends the usage of CNN-based recognition to different variants of the Latin characters and shows it can be successfully used for a set of languages based on that script. It seems to be an effective technique for a set of languages written using the Latin script.

The performance of document text recognition depends on text line segmentation algorithms, which heavily relies on the type of language, author's writing style, pen type, and document quality. In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised text-line segmentation algorithm for printed Arabic documents with and without diacritics. The presented approach employs a projection profile along with connected components in an iterative manner to detect text-lines. The primary benefits of the presented algorithm are (i) it is not threshold dependent, (ii) it is not required a training phase for threshold selection, and (iii) it is robust towards page rotation, font type, size, and style variation for both with and without diacritics documents. The extensive computational simulations on manually collected dataset prove the efficiency of the proposed scheme compared with several baseline and states of the art methods, including, Voronoi, X-Y Cut, Docstrum, Smearing and Seam-carving methods. Computational time analysis also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have achieved huge popularity in solving problems in image analysis and in text recognition. In this work, we assess the effectiveness of CNN-based architectures where a network is trained in recognizing handwritten characters based on Latin script. European languages such as Dutch, French, German, etc., use different variants of the Latin script, so in the conducted research, the Latin alphabet was extended by certain characters with diacritics used in Polish language. To evaluate the recognition results under the same conditions, a handwritten Latin dataset was also developed. The proposed CNN architecture produced an accuracy of 96% for the extended character set. This is comparable to state-of-the-art results found in the domain of identifying handwritten characters. The presented approach extends the usage of CNN-based recognition to different variants of the Latin characters and shows it can be successfully used for a set of languages based on that script. It seems to be an effective technique for a set of languages written using the Latin script. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research reveals that although the effect of diacritics) the symbols that tell the reader how to pronounce a letter) on reading and reading comprehension was examined in a series of studies, the influence of diacritics on listening comprehension, especially in the Arabic orthography, was not examined. Therefore, this study attempted to examine this issue, which may add an additional layer of knowledge to the reading and comprehension process of Arabic in the listening comprehension area. Sixty students participated in the study from two seventh grade classes whose age average is 13 years old. They were sampled from regular classrooms and every week they study 8-10 hours of Arabic weekly. In the study, two texts in the area of listening comprehension in the Arabic language were presented orally to the students in two reading conditions: The first with full diacritics and the second without diacritics. The findings indicate that adding short diacritics to texts improves the listening comprehension on two levels: explicit and implicit. In addition, there is no significant difference between listening comprehension text type (with or without diacritics) regarding the two levels of comprehension separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a sketch of a typological classification of diacritics, according to their role in the graphic system and their position in writing. The diacritics of the Russian writing are under consideration. The research focuses on the letter ё, highlighting traditions and practices of its use. The survey reveals current trends in the use of ё, based on attitudes of young people to it, and factors that influence the choice of ё when writing in different styles (formal/non-formal) and techniques: handwritten or printed (on the computer/other device). Ideological potential of the letter ё is noted, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea for this article took root upon discovering that certain words in the library in which I work's catalog do not appear correctly – words with diacritics, or accents that change the meaning of the word. This begs the questions: in what ways is power created and replicated within our library systems? This article investigates the ways in which libraries codify and replicate English-centric practices by exploring encoding and acquisitions to begin to uncover for whom libraries are meant to serve through a qualitative literature analysis. Classification, cataloging, and the Internet are also discussed to a lesser degree to exemplify the far-reaching nature of this issue. Finally, this article addresses potential ways libraries can de-center English practices embedded within their systems. This article contributes to the discourse on the impact of embedded power hierarchies in library systems and critically explores the frameworks within which we create and communicate information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diacritics in Arabic are optional orthographic symbols used to alter the pronunciation of a letter or distinguish between words of similar spellings, which may add or subtract complexity by imposing additional loads on the individual's information-processing system. In this study, we explored how reading Arabic text with and without diacritical signs (known as ḥarakāt) can influence readers' brain activation. An electroencephalogram (EEG) recording of 18 subjects was used in this study to assess the differences in brain activation while reading in two reading conditions (with and without ḥarakāt). The results showed that ḥarakāt had a significant impact on the cognitive responses of subjects as exemplified by differences in cortical activity between the conditions. Our results imply promising results in the application of reading skills where diacritical marks may play a key role in increasing the level of attention an individual pays to text, thus improving information-processing accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O artigo apresenta uma análise da série de TV O hipnotizador – El hipnotizador , drama produzido e veiculado pelo canal a cabo de TV da HBO Latin American Group, em sua sexta produçao genuína e primeira série bilíngue. Os diacríticos semióticos de (des)continuidades culturais, como heteroglossia, cronotopo e hibridez espaciotemporal são mobilizados para estruturar o exame da série. A aplicabilidade dos procedimentos de inversão, descontinuidade, especificidade e exterioridade discursiva é observada transversalmente no texto. A análise propõe a noção de mediapaisagem como adequada ao produto audiovisual, dado seu propõsito de explorar a condição transfronteiriça da "comunidade latina", convertendo aspectos de mobilidade e fluidez em capital midiático disponível a cooperações da variada equipe componente da instância produtiva. Na perspectiva da audiência, a mediapaisagem engendrada atinge comunidades migratórias, móveis e deslocalizadas, plasmando implicações e diretrizes animadoras de mudanças de futuro e de suas expectativas. The article presents an analysis of the TV series The Hypnotist, a drama produced and aired by HBO Latin American Group's cable TV channel in its sixth original production and first bilingual series. The notion of semiotic diacritics of cultural (dis)continuities, such as heteroglossia, chronotopes, and spatiotemporal hybridity, is key to my examination of the series. I apply procedures of inversion, discontinuity, specificity, and discursive exteriority throughout the text. My analysis proposes the concept of mediascape as appropriate to the audiovisual product, given the purpose of exploring the cross-border condition of the "Latin community," converting aspects of mobility and fluidity into media capital that the various production teams can leverage. From the perspective of the audience, the mediascape that is engendered leads to migratory, mobile, and resettled communities, setting up implications and encouraging agendas to change the future and general expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My conversation with Annabel Kim, editor of this special issue of Diacritics , about my contribution to the journal influenced my understanding of how citation might apply to a process of making, and specifically my process of making. She spoke of citation as a form of relation. This phrase began to evoke for me a constellation of people, experiences, conversations, and texts that I would and could cite in relation to how I work, what I make, how I think. "Form of relation" speaks to the formal and the social simultaneously, the formal relations on the surface of a painting and the social relations in space and time—the many influences that yield a production of knowledge and understanding. I was left wondering about how painters, or visual artists more broadly, make their influences visible, to whom they are visible, and if there are other ways to do so. What follows is a brief foray into a constellation of relations, a series of incomplete citations that I hope will illuminate some of the ways in which my making is indebted to others whom I cannot cite directly in my work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the role of Arabic diacritics in word recognition and their impact on Arabic L2 learners' reading speed, accuracy, and comprehension at different stages of Arabic L2 acquisition. Fifty‐four English L2 learners of Arabic from 3 proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) participated in the study. They belonged to 2 sets of groups: half with exposure to instructional materials containing diacritics, vowelized textbook (VT), and the other half with exposure to instructional materials not containing diacritics, un‐vowelized textbook (UVT). Participants performed word‐list reading, text reading, and target‐word comprehension tasks under vowelized (V) and un‐vowelized (UV) conditions. The results revealed participants in all VT groups did consistently better than their UVT counterparts. This positive role of diacritics in terms of Arabic word recognition and reading performance implies that inclusion of diacritics in words and texts within instructional materials does not only benefit Arabic L2 learners by removing ambiguity from words, but it also positively impacts their reading and pronunciation performance in general. The study findings and pedagogical implications are also relevant to other languages, such as Farsi and Hebrew, which exhibit similar orthographic features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diacritics restoration is a necessary component in order to develop Arabic text to speech systems. When diacritics are present, the phonetic transcription algorithm can be implemented based on a few rules. Restoring Arabic diacritics based on language model scoring is the dominant approach. A fixed vocabulary is usually used to build the language model used for scoring. Since Arabic is a morphologically rich language, the number of the Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words is large and the diacritization algorithm fails to restore diacritics for these words. In this letter, we present a novel approach to support open vocabulary diacritics restoration based on the Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) method. The BPE method segments the words into variable length sub-word units and allows open vocabulary from fixed sub-word units dictionary. On the Tashkeela diacritization task, this open vocabulary approach outperforms the word and character based methods commonly used in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Strategic Universe Journal / Univers Strategic is the property of Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Institute for Security Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Dilemas Contemporáneos: Educación, Política y Valores is the property of Dilemas Contemporaneos: Educacion, Politica y Valores and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Strategic Universe Journal / Univers Strategic is the property of Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Institute for Security Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

With the rapid growth of the Internet and mobile devices, the need for hidden communications has significantly increased. Steganography is a technique introduced for establishing hidden communication, Most steganography techniques have been applied to audio, images, videos, and text. Many researchers used steganography in Arabic texts to take advantage of adding, editing or changing letters or diacritics, but lead to notable and suspicious text. In this paper, we propose two novel steganography algorithms for Arabic text using the Holy Quran as cover text. The fact that it is forbidden to add, edit or change any letter or diacritics in the Holy Quran provides the valuable feature of its robustness and difficulty as a cover in steganography. The algorithms hide secret messages elements within Arabic letters benefiting from the existence of sun letters (Arabic: ḥurūf shamsīyah) and moon letters (ḥurūf qamarīyah). Also, we consider the existence of some Arabic language characteristics represented as small vowel letters (Arabic Diacritics). Our experiments using the proposed two algorithms demonstrate high capacity for text files. The proposed algorithms are robust against attack since the changes in the cover text are imperceptible, so our contribution offers a more secure algorithm that provides good capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary coexistence of fronted and plosive reflexes of gīm excites much scholarly interest: does the voiced velar stop [g] reflex prevalent in some urban areas of Egypt constitute a continuation of the Proto-Semitic phoneme /g/; or is it a recent phenomenon, the result of a process of 'de-affrication' which stabilized in Cairo and its surrounding provinces as late as 1800-60 ce? Following the influential work of Blanc (1969, 1981) and Hary (1996a), the latter interpretation has become the established consensus among scholars of Judaeo-Arabic. In relation to Judaeo-Arabic, Blanc's thesis relies on (i) the use of the diacritic with gimel denoting gīm and (ii) occurrences of assimilation, metathesis and substitute graphemic representations of gīm. In questioning the assumption of the diacritic's phonetic significance, demonstrating its unreliability as a source from which to reconstruct the historical phonetic reflexes of gīm and re-examining oft-cited instances of assimilation, metathesis and graphemic substitutions in light of new evidence, this paper establishes that Judaeo-Arabic orthography makes a much more limited, albeit valuable, contribution to the field of historical Arabic linguistics in this regard than has previously been suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The references on Arabic language describe the concept of Vowel Reduction as hastiness in reciting vowels. The books on Quraninc recitations explain that this vocal phenomenon is adopted through listening and viva voce. This phenomenon is more common in Quran recitation than in ancient Arabic poetry. Authors and linguists discussed this phenomenon trying to explain, clarify, criticize and accredit it. However, the importance of this study stems from the researcher’s observations on the lack of any research paper on this topic solely. This phenomenon is discussed only under sections of different books and references specialized in Arabic language or Quranic recitations. This study is a collection of the scattered information and references on this topic. It also aims at serving and studying Arabic Language in accordance with the explanations and knowledge of ancient scholars and the research of modern scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]