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The purpose of this research study is to extract and identify named entities from Hadith literature. Named entity recognition (NER) refers to the identification of the named entities in a computer readable text having an annotation of categorization tags for information extraction. NER is an active research area in information management and information retrieval systems. NER serves as a baseline for machines to understand the context of a given content and helps in knowledge extraction. Although NER is considered as a solved task in major languages such as English, in languages such as Urdu, NER is still a challenging task. Moreover, NER depends on the language and domain of study; thus, it is gaining the attention of researchers in different domains.

This paper proposes a knowledge extraction framework using finite-state transducers (FSTs) – KEFST – to extract the named entities. KEFST consists of five steps: content extraction, tokenization, part of speech tagging, multi-word detection and NER. An extensive empirical analysis using the data corpus of Urdu translation of Sahih Al-Bukhari, a widely known hadith book, reveals that the proposed method effectively recognizes the entities to obtain better results.

The significant performance in terms of f-measure, precision and recall validates that the proposed model outperforms the existing methods for NER in the relevant literature.

This research is novel in this regard that no previous work is proposed in the Urdu language to extract named entities using FSTs and no previous work is proposed for Urdu hadith data NER.

The purpose of this paper is to apply state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for assessing the quality of the restaurants using restaurant inspection data. The machine learning techniques are applied to solve the real-world problems in all sphere of life. Health and food departments pay regular visits to restaurants for inspection and mark the condition of the restaurant on the basis of the inspection. These inspections consider many factors that determine the condition of the restaurants and make it possible for the authorities to classify the restaurants.

In this paper, standard machine learning techniques, support vector machines, naïve Bayes and random forest classifiers are applied to classify the critical level of the restaurants on the basis of features identified during the inspection. The importance of different factors of inspection is determined by using feature selection through the help of the minimum-redundancy-maximum-relevance and linear vector quantization feature importance methods.

The experiments are accomplished on the real-world New York City restaurant inspection data set that contains diverse inspection features. The results show that the nonlinear support vector machine achieves better accuracy than other techniques. Moreover, this research study investigates the importance of different factors of restaurant inspection and finds that inspection score and grade are significant features. The performance of the classifiers is measured by using the standard performance evaluation measures of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity.

This research uses a real-world data set of restaurant inspection that has, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, never been used previously by researchers. The findings are helpful in identifying the best restaurants and help finding the factors that are considered important in restaurant inspection. The results are also important in identifying possible biases in restaurant inspections by the authorities.

This study sought to better understand how to support and plan for a collaborative effort that brought educators together from three universities in the United States and Pakistan. This project sough to foster collaborative relationships between the two countries by expanding knowledge, collaboration, and capacity in middle schools in the Punjab region of Pakistan with a particular focus on underrepresented students and middle grades STEM instruction.

This study was informed through the use of formative survey data gathered from the workshop participants throughout the course of the week. The researchers conducted pre and post surveys of 22 participants using Likert scale items.

This project provided insights regarding curriculum alignment, engaging communication, teacher-centered formative data. These findings offered insights on how to grow as reflective practitioners and researchers, and how to form a robust multi-national professional learning community.

The survey data were gathered from participants who willingly sought professional development in one region of Pakistan. The sample was small (four participating middle schools and one local university) and thus the findings cannot be necessarily generalized to a greater population.

This project provides practical insights of how teams can work together in regard to building a professional learning community. Teams can plan with intentionality, foster various modes of discussion, and empower both teachers and students to inquire, solve problems, and share their insights.

The STEM topics in this study are important across continents. Navigating time constraints and distance is feasible through communication, attention to objectives and clarity in goals, and a desire to learn outside of one’s usual comfort zones.

This project was unique in the time and space in which it was designed and implemented, yet it offers value in fostering ongoing collaboration through various modalities and in being intentional in the planning process.

Islamic marketing ethics focus on the principles of equity, justice and value maximization for the welfare of society. These ethics play a vital role in elevating the standards of customer behavior. The strategy of focusing customer is now considered as important element because of rapidly changing marketing trends in Islamic banks. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to find out the important features of Islamic marketing ethics and identify their effect on customer’s satisfaction in Islamic banking.

This study is descriptive and quantitative. Data were collected from 1000 customers of Islamic banks by applying convenient sampling technique. Smart PLS was used to check the scale validation by confirmatory factor analysis. To test the hypotheses, structural equation modeling technique was used.

Results enlightened that Islamic marketing ethics play a significant role in enhancing the customer’s satisfaction. Islamic banks should focus on marketing mix along with Islamic and ethical perspectives to improve the customer’s satisfaction level.

This study highlighted that Islamic marketing ethics have great impact on customer satisfaction. Therefore, Islamic banks need to concentrate on the ethical perspective of Islamic marketing in order to develop long term customer relationships. Islamic banks need to revise their marketing practices, and they should align their marketing tactics with ethical Islamic boundaries. They need to design, communicate and enforce the code of Islamic ethics within organizations.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how Islamic marketing ethics effect customer satisfaction.

This study aims to highlight the impact of information acquisition confidence and social outcome confidence on information search and information share intention. Moreover, the role of subjective knowledge is analyzed as a mediating variable among these relations.

This study conducted a survey which generated 233 valid responses. The data were analyzed using component factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Whereas, to examine the mediating effect, Hayes and Preacher (2008) model for statistical mediation analysis was used.

The results mainly supported the model by confirming that subjective knowledge, information acquisition confidence and social outcome confidence are positively related to information search intention. No association between information acquisition confidence and information sharing intention was found. The study's findings also suggested a positive association of social outcome confidence, subjective knowledge and information acquisition confidence with information share intention. Moreover, the results revealed that there is a significant and positive mediating effect of subjective knowledge between information acquisition confidence and information search intention. Subjective knowledge also acts as a mediator in the relationship between social outcome confidence and information sharing intention.

This study will be helpful for marketers and policymakers for designing marketing strategies which can enhance the flow of information. Moreover, this study will ensure the importance of information to marketers.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study the impact of consumer information acquisition confidence, social outcome confidence on information search and sharing with mediating role of subjective knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to boost the existing literature on adaptive market hypothesis (AMH) as it first time links predictability of gold, silver and metal returns with AMH which permits the predictability of returns to vary over time.

To know whether commodity (gold, silver and metal) market is efficient or not, the commodity returns are observed by using appropriate linear time series tests (variance ratio test, runs test and auto-correlation test). To capture the varying efficiency of three commodities, the study employs subsamples of five years and all sub-samples are exposed to linear econometric tests to reveal how market efficiency (independency of returns) has behaved over time.

It is found that the commodity market (gold, silver and metal) is adaptive because fluctuation is observed in the market efficiency. Returns of all three commodities go under the periods of efficiency and inefficiency. Thus, AMH is the better description of behavior of commodity markets than traditional efficient market hypothesis.

Choice of sub-sample in the study is the first limitation as the authors employ a sub-sample comprising five years. Second, commission, fee and taxes (transection cost) are ignored in the study. Finally, the results are reported on the basis of linear econometric tests. In future, longer time period sub-sample analysis is suggested by the study to explore the varying nature of the commodities. Moreover, rolling window analysis may be a more appropriate method to elucidate the idea of AMH in further research. It is further suggested that the method used in the study could be helpful and adapted to examine other commodities (metal and agriculture), bonds and equity markets around the world.

The study will provide a better investment model which can enable the investors to seek more returns in future. Moreover, this research can be extended to explore multiple issues like adaptive behavior of returns from crypto currencies, bonds, stocks and real estate investment trusts.

As all the linear tests reveal that almost all the commodities show inefficient behavior in full sample period, it is clear that past prices widely would be helpful to predict the future prices at NYSE; furthermore, investors can use the time-varying information to reduce the risk of investment at NYSE. The study is helpful for individual investors as well as portfolio managers and brokers to forecast the prices on the bases of findings.

The paper identifies the need to study why behavior of commodity returns varies over time.

Deeni Madaris of Pakistan and their libraries are playing an important role in educating the large fraction of society. They have always been engaged in the development of social and cultural values of the Pakistani society. This study aims to investigate the organization of information resources and their utilization at Deeni Madaris libraries in the central Punjab, Pakistan.

Quantitative research approach was adopted for this study. A questionnaire was developed on the bases of related literature and discussions with experts of librarianship as well as Islamic studies in Pakistan. The questionnaire was sent to 49 Deeni Madaris, of which five did not have libraries and four did not respond. Forty (81.6 per cent) Deeni Madaris responded and provided the relevant data about their libraries. The collected data were analyzed through SPSS 22. Mostly descriptive statistics were applied to calculate the frequencies, percentage, means and standard deviations. A two-tailed t-test was applied to check the impact of cataloguing and automation on the use of information resources.

It was found that majority of the respondents developed their own classification and cataloguing methods for the organization of information resources and did not have a proper retrieval system. Majority of the respondents were providing lending services to readers. Teachers and final-year students were the key users of the libraries. They mostly referred to books, theses and serials written in Urdu and Arabic language. The situation of library computerization was very weak; only 19 libraries had computers and 11 of them have partially automated the library activities. Library automation and catalogue put positive effects on the use of library resources.

The exploration of the literature showed that libraries of Madaris in Pakistan have always been a priority, but these libraries did not get a position in the library literature as they deserve. This study will fill this gap.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to find out the perception of university librarians about the current and required competencies and to identify the current rank and to point out the benchmark for competencies of library professionals at public universities in Pakistan.

Quantitative research design is used for the conduct of the current study. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data. The Special Libraries Association instrument “Competencies for Information Professionals of the 21st Century” was used to design the questionnaire. A paired sample t-test is used to establish whether there is any noteworthy distinction between the current and required levels of skills. Inferential statistic was also used and independent sample t-test and ANOVA was used to identify the difference in perception on the basis of different demographic variables.

There is a significant gap between the perceptions of university librarians about their present skills and required skills. The present level of skills is lower than the desired level of competence. There is no significant relationship between the length of job (i.e. experience), grade and skills of academic librarians. But in the case of gender, male have a higher score on the current level of competencies while female have a higher score on the required level of skills.

The findings of this study are helpful for universities in the recruitment, management and training of their librarians on the basis of required skills. Furthermore, it will be useful for librarians in their career planning and continuing education and library schools to revise their curriculum in accordance with needs.

This paper aims to examine the association between green innovation and the cost of equity in China. This study relies on the investors’ base perspective and shareholders’ perceived risk perspective to investigate the relation between green innovation and the cost of equity in China.

The paper uses firm-fixed effect regression for a sample of Chinese public companies for the period 2008–2018.

The authors find a negative relationship between green innovation and the cost of equity capital. This negative association is found to be more pronounced for less financially constrained firms, during periods of high economic policy uncertainty, and for firms with a strong internal control environment. Finally, the paper shows that the negative association became more pronounced after the passage of the Environmental Protection Law of China in 2012. The results remain robust to possible endogeneity concerns.

This study contributes to the green innovation literature by documenting that shareholders favorably view firms implementing green innovation policies. The study also has policy implications for Chinese regulators in improving the green credit policy.

This paper aims to explore the impact of lean, Six Sigma and environmental sustainability on the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Pakistan. The firm performance has been measured in terms of operational, business and environmental performance.

A survey-based methodology is adopted for collecting data from the main cities of Punjab, Pakistan. SMEs related to different industries such as service, manufacturing, automotive and retail were targeted. The data gathered were ordinal, and Spearman's correlation test was used as the data analysis technique.

The findings indicated that the three management styles positively impacted the environmental performance of SMEs. Moreover, no significant relationship was found between the three management styles and the SMEs' business and operational performance.

To counter the inefficient and wasteful practices of SMEs and their detrimental impact on overall firm performance, SMEs have to refocus and reconfigure their management strategies. It is implied to use lean, Six Sigma and environmental sustainability practices to achieve this goal.

The study empirically investigates the impact of lean, Six Sigma and environmental sustainability on the performance of SMEs in Pakistan, which is the first study to be conducted in the Pakistani context.