Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether age plays a role in the acquisition of construct state (CS) constructions in Arabic by 14 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It also examined the challenges faced by children with ASD in producing different types of CS constructions. Finally, the study analysed the sources of difficulties children with ASD encounter during the learning process of the CS.

For the purposes of this study, the participants were asked to orally complete short sentences with the help of illustrative pictures.

Results revealed that the age of the 14 children with ASD plays a role in the acquisition of CS constructions. Children of age 12–15 performed better than those of age 8 and 10. Results also showed that children with ASD performed better in producing phrases rather than compounds. Moreover, the participants performed better on endocentric compounds as opposed to exocentric ones. Finally, analysing the errors produced on the text revealed that the acquisition of head direction precedes definiteness.

The topic of the study has not been investigated yet and the study concluded with some important findings concerning teaching Arabic CS to children with ADS.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of using colors and learner’s intelligence quotient (IQ) in teaching new vocabulary in Arabic (L1) and English (L2) to children with autism spectrum disorder (henceforth, ASD).

To this end, 12 autistic children whose ages ranged between 7 and 12 were observed while they were being taught ten new words. The children were divided into two groups based on their IQ: Low (70–74) and High (76–79). The children were also divided into two groups: Group 1 studied the words written in a black font, whereas Group 2 studied the same words, but written in colors (each letter in the word in a different color), and an illustrative picture was provided with each word for both groups. The pictures were also different in color in the former group, while the picture was in black and white in the latter. The children involved in the study have a relatively slight ability to read letters based on an annual language assessment conducted by the center, and they learn a new word by learning its shape and by repetition. The experiment took place over a two-week period that involved teaching, revising and testing.

The results of the study showed that the children’s IQ played a crucial role in learning L1 and L2 vocabulary. The results also demonstrated that using colors had no significant impact on the children’s performance in the test. Finally, the results showed that teaching new words to children with ASD through repetition and drilling could be regarded as a useful technique. The study concludes with some recommendations for further studies.

The study shows that using pictures is a very useful tool in teaching L1 and L2 vocabulary to children with ASD.

This paper aims to utilize Whitley's theory of the intellectual and social organization of the sciences and build on research carried on by Aarek et al., Vakkari, Rochester and Vakkari, and Åström, to analyze both intellectual and institutional characteristics of Arabic library and information science (LIS).

Data derived from a content analysis of sampled research articles published in seven core peer‐reviewed Arabic LIS journals and from an inventory of the currently identified Arabic LIS educational institutions, professional associations, and scholarly communication channels were analyzed in terms of Whitley's theory and relevant LIS research.

The social organization of Arabic LIS has highly influenced its intellectual organization. An analysis of types and diversity of institutional affiliations, determination of terminology, resources and fund accessibility, scholarly communication of intellectual productivity, and research collaboration point to high levels of “tasks uncertainty”, low levels of “mutual dependency” and uncontrolled “reputational autonomy”.

Because Arabic LIS institutions, associations, and research channels are poorly represented on the internet or in accessible literature, it was difficult to collect data comprehensively. While the findings are suggestive and are in agreement with views from the Arabic LIS literature, the results cannot be generalized to regions beyond the Arab world. This investigation is not primarily intended as a contribution to the philosophy of LIS, but to describe the development of LIS in the Arab States within a broad social and intellectual framework.

While there is a considerable body of theoretically‐oriented interpretations for bibliometric findings, no research has been conducted to analyze the social and intellectual dimensions of LIS in the Arab world. This paper also fills a gap for this type of the research in Arabic LIS and creates awareness of Arabic LIS for English‐speaking readers.

This study aims to address the reliability and validity of the shortened versions of the Arabic dimensions of the learning organization questionnaire (DLOQ) to provide evidence on the learning organization (LO) concept in Lebanon and to draw attention to the applicability of the LO concept to facilitate the development and operationalization of the LO in the Lebanese context.

A total of 298 cases from five Lebanese firms were analyzed. Rigorous translation procedures have been applied to ensure the relevance of this instrument in the Arabic context. Confirmatory factor analysis, item-internal consistency estimates and item intercorrelation analysis showed that the 21- and the seven-item versions of the Arabic DLOQ have produced reliable measurement scores with a construct validity adequate to measure the LO culture in the Lebanese context.

The results of the current study confirmed that the shortened 21- and seven-item versions of the Arabic DLOQ are reliable, validated and applicable in the Lebanese context. This study also added to the stability of this foundation and pointed out weak areas that can be addressed by refining and developing the research, theory and practice of the LO.

The results of this study based on the shortened versions contributed to operationalizing a conceptually developed LO theory, which is an appropriate example of theory building in an applied discipline. The results also suggest that the LO comprised interdependent building blocks that need to be integrated at the individual, team and organizational levels to promote change and development in a system.

This study provides managers and HR practitioners, especially in the Lebanese context, with a sound model of the LO theory to be applied in their organizations.

This study provides scholars with an understanding of the potential value of the LO in the Lebanese context. The results present evidence of the cultural impact on the perceptions of the LO in the Lebanese context, confirm the applicability of the shortened Arabic DLOQ and provide HR practitioners in Lebanon with a tool to diagnose LO characteristics accurately and consistently and to determine if there is a link between the LO and organizational performance.

Multi-label Text Classification (MTC) is one of the most recent research trends in data mining and information retrieval domains because of many reasons such as the rapid growth of online data and the increasing tendency of internet users to be more comfortable with assigning multiple labels/tags to describe documents, emails, posts, etc. The dimensionality of labels makes MTC more difficult and challenging compared with traditional single-labeled text classification (TC). Because it is a natural extension of TC, several ways are proposed to benefit from the rich literature of TC through what is called problem transformation (PT) methods. Basically, PT methods transform the multi-label data into a single-label one that is suitable for traditional single-label classification algorithms. Another approach is to design novel classification algorithms customized for MTC. Over the past decade, several works have appeared on both approaches focusing mainly on the English language. This work aims to present an elaborate study of MTC of Arabic articles.

This paper presents a novel lexicon-based method for MTC, where the keywords that are most associated with each label are extracted from the training data along with a threshold that can later be used to determine whether each test document belongs to a certain label.

The experiments show that the presented approach outperforms the currently available approaches. Specifically, the results of our experiments show that the best accuracy obtained from existing approaches is only 18 per cent, whereas the accuracy of the presented lexicon-based approach can reach an accuracy level of 31 per cent.

Although there exist some tools that can be customized to address the MTC problem for Arabic text, their accuracies are very low when applied to Arabic articles. This paper presents a novel method for MTC. The experiments show that the presented approach outperforms the currently available approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence and advantages of leadership multiculturalism on global strategy development through cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBA) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) from emerging market multinational companies (EMNCs) expanding into emerged markets. The key contribution of asymmetric multiculturalism is a novel finding based on inductive research. We fill a gap by further linking business leader characteristics and corporate strategic actions and examining how multicultural business leaders from emerging markets can be highly effective at CBA and CSR.

The paper draws on in-depth interviews, observations and documentary evidence analyzed with iterative coding, construct definition and thematic development to understand how leadership multiculturalism affects CBA and CSR in an EMNC over time.

The new construct of leadership asymmetric multiculturalism describes strategic advantages accruing to leaders from developing markets who are culturally fluent in both emerging and emerged market milieus. The construct contributes to emergent research on the rise of multicultural leaders and their strategic advantages and delineates a pathway toward identifying advantages of emerging over emerged market business leaders.

The research addresses specific CBA and CSR strategies within one emerging market region and EMNC. Future research should further articulate and validate the key construct of asymmetric multiculturalism, further examine its sources, draw more explicit comparisons with data from emerged market leaders, and explore the applicability of these findings to strategic actions and advantages in both emerging and emerged markets.

Emerging market corporate leaders should identify and develop pertinent aspects of their own asymmetric multiculturalism in enacting CBA and CSR strategy with respect to EMNCs and firms from developed markets. Emerged market leaders should become more aware of and cultivate their own multiculturalism.

Asymmetric multiculturalism can be accompanied by heightened awareness of global citizenship — including codes of ethics, environmental challenges, community outreach and fair labor practices — which, in tandem with CBA, can strengthen emerging market firms’ performance and reinforce their global stature and reputation.

Asymmetric multiculturalism is a new explanatory construct in the sociological, economic and management disciplines. Emerging markets corporate leaders utilize their multicultural competence to accelerate global CBA and CSR activity and advance strategic opportunities for their firms. The identification of advantages deriving from emerging market leadership capabilities is an unusual finding given the more typical emphasis on the privileges of emerged market leaders and firms.

The purpose of this study is to examine the most frequent countries and prevalent discourses in the context of homosexuality in the headlines of Arabic-language media outlets.

This study combined both corpus linguistic (CL) quantitative and critical discourse analysis (CDA) qualitative approaches to analyse five thousand two hundred news headlines that were retrieved from the Factiva news database from 2010 to 2019.

There were six main categories of subjects covered by the media in the context of homosexuality, namely crime, extremist groups, legislation, authority figures and scandals, culture and countries. The analysis showed that the countries whose laws criminalize homosexuals were more frequent than those seen to be supportive of homosexuals. The findings revealed that homosexuals are under-covered in the Arab media, and whenever they are present in the news reports, they are depicted negatively.

This study examined the representation of homosexuals in Arabic headlines from 2010 to 2019. Future researchers may investigate their construction in the body of the articles in different periods and languages.

The present research has implications regarding the necessity of objectivity in covering news about minority groups without being influenced by the stock of ideas circulating in the culture where media outlets report.

The social implications include enhancing the principles and values of solidarity and respecting all groups in society.

Although there is considerable literature on the representation of homosexuals in media outlets, the number of articles that investigated the same concept in the Arab region is relatively limited to the best knowledge of the researchers. Therefore, this study can add great significance to existing knowledge as it tackles a limitedly investigated topic in the Arab world.

Less attention has been paid to users’ interactions and behavior in studying multilingual search. Although digital library researchers have yet to assess user interaction and behavior in multilingual search, they have concurred that there is a need for user studies that document the extent to which information retrieval systems meet multilingual users’ needs and expectations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study is composed of five individual cases. The case study participants were Saudi students enrolled either at a large state university or Historically Black College and University located in the same community. Research questions are, what do Saudi Digital Library (SDL) users experience when searching within the SDL in Arabic and English? And what strategies do they use if they fail to find resources? Data collected for this study were via a qualitative method called video-stimulated recall.

In the Arabic search tasks, participants realized that finding resources is not easy. Participants expressed their concerns about the lack of relevance and accuracy of results returned by the search system, indicating weak trust and confidence in the search system. Whereas in the English search task, participants felt more satisfied and confident in their ability to trust the results returned from the search system. Participants expressed their satisfaction in the search experience as it provided them with accurate and varying resources. The participants faced difficulties finding Arabic resources than English resources in the SDL.

This study is considered one of the earliest works in studying the information-seeking behavior of multilingual digital libraries in the Arabic language. The value of this study arises as being the first study to investigate and report the information-seeking behavior of SDL users.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

This paper aims to propose an approach to automatically annotate a large corpus in Arabic dialect. This corpus is used in order to analyse sentiments of Arabic users on social medias. It focuses on the Algerian dialect, which is a sub-dialect of Maghrebi Arabic. Although Algerian is spoken by roughly 40 million speakers, few studies address the automated processing in general and the sentiment analysis in specific for Algerian.

The approach is based on the construction and use of a sentiment lexicon to automatically annotate a large corpus of Algerian text that is extracted from Facebook. Using this approach allow to significantly increase the size of the training corpus without calling the manual annotation. The annotated corpus is then vectorized using document embedding (doc2vec), which is an extension of word embeddings (word2vec). For sentiments classification, the authors used different classifiers such as support vector machines (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB) and logistic regression (LR).

The results suggest that NB and SVM classifiers generally led to the best results and MLP generally had the worst results. Further, the threshold that the authors use in selecting messages for the training set had a noticeable impact on recall and precision, with a threshold of 0.6 producing the best results. Using PV-DBOW led to slightly higher results than using PV-DM. Combining PV-DBOW and PV-DM representations led to slightly lower results than using PV-DBOW alone. The best results were obtained by the NB classifier with F1 up to 86.9 per cent.

The principal originality of this paper is to determine the right parameters for automatically annotating an Algerian dialect corpus. This annotation is based on a sentiment lexicon that was also constructed automatically.