Search results

This paper aims to propose a new efficient semantic recommender method for Arabic content.

Three semantic similarities were proposed to be integrated with the recommender system to improve its ability to recommend based on the semantic aspect. The proposed similarities are CHI-based semantic similarity, singular value decomposition (SVD)-based semantic similarity and Arabic WordNet-based semantic similarity. These similarities were compared with the existing similarities used by recommender systems from the literature.

Experiments show that the proposed semantic method using CHI-based similarity and using SVD-based similarity are more efficient than the existing methods on Arabic text in term of accuracy and execution time.

Although many previous works proposed recommender system methods for English text, very few works concentrated on Arabic Text. The field of Arabic Recommender Systems is largely understudied in the literature. Aside from this, there is a vital need to consider the semantic relationships behind user preferences to improve the accuracy of the recommendations. The contributions of this work are the following. First, as many recommender methods were proposed for English text and have never been tested on Arabic text, this work compares the performance of these widely used methods on Arabic text. Second, it proposes a novel semantic recommender method for Arabic text. As this method uses semantic similarity, three novel base semantic similarities were proposed and evaluated. Third, this work would direct the attention to more studies in this understudied topic in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight how future teaching in business schools will probably take place in an online (here called 24/7) classroom, where culturally diverse e‐learners around the globe meet. Technologies such as iPhone, iPad and a variety of social media, to mention but a few, give management learners of any age easy 24/7 access to information. Depending on the quality of the materials and the competences and cross‐cultural sensibilities of the teachers and trainers, this information may support the progress of e‐learning in business schools. At the same time, easy online access to knowledge and educational structures is not, in practice, equally available yet across cultures, and this will be documented with comparative cases from the Arab world and African learning communities.

This article contributes to multicultural education by identifying various barriers in the online management classroom. It combines theories from educational and cross‐cultural leadership studies, as well as e‐learning studies.

The outcomes of this analysis show how technical, language and cross‐cultural barriers still hinder particular adult learners to benefit from the “24/7 business school”. It is concluded that by understanding and serving a wide range of culturally diverse e‐learners in business schools, the stewardship role of the business school teacher is key.

The interplay between technical, language and cultural barriers in the online business school is rarely reflected upon. It is the intention of the authors to trigger a broad discussion process by focusing on culturally diverse management learners and by connecting with innovative educational insights across histories and cultures.

The main objective of this article is to contribute to the field of accessibility in the teaching of sign language in the international panorama, examining its applicability, evaluation methods as well as the assistive technologies used to improve teaching experiences and the creation of new materials, proposing a theoretical framework that relates the teaching of sign language at different academic levels, the training of teachers, as well as parents, and the use of technology to achieve educational inclusion. It follows that the adoption of hybrid technology approaches, following universal design principles, can help to integrate access to education and sign language literacy.

The working method used to carry out this work consists of a systematic review of the scientific literature. This is a research project based on the recapitulation of information about sign language in the international panorama and the improvements used for its instruction. For this purpose, the well-known PRISMA (Moher et al., 2009) is used to synthesize the search carried out. A systematic review of the articles published in scientific journals about pedagogy in the teaching of sign language in the international field and technological innovation for sign language teaching has been carried out, incorporating different approaches and personal assessments. The first phase of the method consists of identifying and analyzing the articles published in scientific journals on the teaching of sign language on the international scene and the importance of new educational models with the incorporation of various didactic adaptations, evaluating the selected articles over a period of time from 2009 to 2021. Six steps were used in the systematic review study (Figure 1). First, Steps 1–4 were conducted in 2020 and 2021 as part of a doctoral research. A schematic summary of Steps 1–4 is presented below, followed by Steps 5 and 6, added later to the study after completion of Step 4. In the case of the first four steps they were conducted by two researchers: the thesis tutor and the doctoral student, and Steps 5 and 6 were conducted by the Ph.

To carry out the analysis of the results, the codification of the variables was carried out. The selected studies are characterized by their international context with a final selection of 39 studies have found several variables that affect the relationship between the teaching of sign language in the international arena and the use of technological innovations to adapt their teaching to students (Figure 4). In this section we present the technology grouped variables included in each factor and the possibilities of standardization and applicability of sign language teaching in the international panorama. Within these articles, the importance of defining training programs in sign language for teachers and the need to evaluate teaching programs is identified, with a focus on actions to improve school curricula to achieve linguistic standardization and inclusion in the academic environment, as well as their use at all levels of education. Therefore, professional practices and cooperation between institutions such as: associations of families of deaf students and educational institutions must be improved, making it possible to give a quality education. Within the exclusion criteria, the articles that do not use sign language teaching tools (n = 45) were subsequently discarded, followed by the articles that do not indicate any intervention in students with disabilities (n = 48), concluding with the articles that nonsign language disability education (n = 44). Subsequently, among those selected, the technology articles that do not speak about sign language were discarded (n = 32), as well as the studies that protect indigenous language but not sign language (n = 33) and, to conclude, the linguistic normalization articles but do not cite sign language (n = 37).

Communication is the element by which the authors can understand each other with the rest of the people around us, in the diversity of language, within non-verbal language, the authors find sign language, the language of deaf and mute people, of families, as a professional employee and nowadays, learned by many non-deaf and mute people to achieve a more inclusive and integrated society with all people. Every country has the right to have its own sign language, especially one that claims its culture and customs, through non-verbal communication with which to express multiple meanings, emotions and intentions. It is essential to know and apply the technological advances that are being developed, promoting the right to autonomy and the defense of the indigenous language as a cultural element of the intangible heritage of each country. The use of technology allows the democratization of culture and access to information regardless of where one lives in the world, in an increasingly globalized society in which communication plays a fundamental role. In the case of the global pandemic, it has forced us to the advancement of home education and the use of efficient digital tools to achieve it such as videoconferencing, in the field of disability there are still many limitations on this use by the various companies that develop them. Within the inclusive educational research the authors must emphasize the need for equality of tools and content for all types of students, especially in sign language. Large digital gaps have been generated in families with and without resources at international level, which also have a member with a disability, this is pointed out in the research mentioning the current situation of the American continent, as well as the search for improvement of the tools and platforms in which they are developed.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the reasons behind the persistent preference for printed content among Arabic-speaking library patrons in Jordan. Specifically, this study highlights the availability of reading materials in print, electronic and audible formats in Arabic as an intervening factor shaping reading behavior. More broadly, it aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how language preference can impact reading format preferences.

This study’s research design revolves around understanding reading format preferences among registered members of Jordan’s largest and oldest private library. This approach involved the examination of secondary library user survey data collected from N = 313 of its patrons in 2022. To gain a greater understanding of the preference for printed materials, this study conducted semistructured interviews over the phone with n = 31 participants of the library’s survey.

The findings of this study indicate a strong preference for print books among Arabic-speaking library patrons in Jordan. However, the availability of content in electronic and audible formats in Arabic, their preferred reading language, emerged as a potentially significant factor in the persistent preference for printed reading materials.

This study offers new insights into the specific role that the availability of content in Arabic, and possibly languages other than English, may play in shaping reading format preferences. By shedding light on this aspect of reading behavior, this research offers valuable information for libraries and publishers seeking to cater to the needs and preferences of Arabic readers.

Arabic Across the Curriculum is a broad language support program at Zayed University in the UAE, which has stimulated discussion on several issues concerning Arabic language support in the Arab world in general and in the Gulf area in particular. These issues can be summed up in the following questions: Why do we need to teach Arabic to native Arabic-speaking students? How will Arabic language proficiency help students in their academic and future careers? Which Arabic language skills should we teach native speakers in higher education, and how? What means of assessment and what criteria might be helpful to Arabic programs and instructors?

The present study was designed to investigate eight research questions that are related to the analysis and the detection of dialectal Arabic hate speech that targeted African refugees and illegal migrants on the YouTube Algerian space.

The transfer learning approach which recently presents the state-of-the-art approach in natural language processing tasks has been exploited to classify and detect hate speech in Algerian dialectal Arabic. Besides, a descriptive analysis has been conducted to answer the analytical research questions that aim at measuring and evaluating the presence of the anti-refugee/migrant discourse on the YouTube social platform.

Data analysis revealed that there has been a gradual modest increase in the number of anti-refugee/migrant hateful comments on YouTube since 2014, a sharp rise in 2017 and a sharp decline in later years until 2021. Furthermore, our findings stemming from classifying hate content using multilingual and monolingual pre-trained language transformers demonstrate a good performance of the AraBERT monolingual transformer in comparison with the monodialectal transformer DziriBERT and the cross-lingual transformers mBERT and XLM-R.

Automatic hate speech detection in languages other than English is quite a challenging task that the literature has tried to address by various approaches of machine learning. Although the recent approach of cross-lingual transfer learning offers a promising solution, tackling this problem in the context of the Arabic language, particularly dialectal Arabic makes it even more challenging. Our results cast a new light on the actual ability of the transfer learning approach to deal with low-resource languages that widely differ from high-resource languages as well as other Latin-based, low-resource languages.

Accurate information is the basis for well-informed decision-making, which is particularly challenging in the dynamic reality of a pandemic. Search engines are a major gateway for obtaining information, yet little is known about the quality and scientific accuracy of information answering conspiracy-related queries about COVID-19, especially outside of English-speaking countries and languages.

The authors conducted an algorithmic audit of Google Search, emulating search queries about COVID-19 conspiracy theories in 10 different locations and four languages (English, Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew) and used content analysis by native language speakers to examine the quality of the available information.

Searching the same conspiracies in different languages led to fundamentally different results. English had the largest share of 52% high-quality scientific information. The average quality score of the English-language results was significantly higher than in Russian and Arabic. Non-English languages had a considerably higher percentage of conspiracy-supporting content. In Russian, nearly 40% of the results supported conspiracies compared to 18% in English.

This study’s findings highlight structural differences that significantly limit access to high-quality, balanced, and accurate information about the pandemic, despite its existence on the Internet in another language. Addressing these gaps has the potential to improve individual decision-making collective outcomes for non-English societies.

The purpose of this paper is to map out the status of Arabic language teaching as practiced in the Arab World today and to bring into focus the main issues that any improvement to that discipline would need to address.

A review of the current teaching practices and needs in the teaching of the Arabic language.

Arabic language teaching practices remain teacher centered and bound to teaching the textbook and overlooking the importance of aligning the curriculum to instruction and assessment.

The need is critical for writing national standards for the Arabic language in addition to establishing teacher colleges that offer quality pedagogical training all backed by sound research and generous funding.

The paper highlights the importance of teaching and seeing the Arabic language in a totally new light that preserves national identity yet embraces best teaching practices.

This paper aims to equip professionals and researchers in the fields of advertising, branding, public relations, marketing communications, social media analytics and marketing with a simple, effective and dynamic means of evaluating consumer behavioural sentiments and engagement through Arabic language and script, in vivo.

Using quantitative and qualitative situational linguistic analyses of Classical Arabic, found in Quranic and religious texts scripts; Modern Standard Arabic, which is commonly used in formal Arabic channels; and dialectical Arabic, which varies hugely from one Arabic country to another: this study analyses rich marketing and consumer messages (tweets) – as a basis for developing an Arabic language social media methodological tool.

Despite the popularity of Arabic language communication on social media platforms across geographies, currently, comprehensive language processing toolkits for analysing Arabic social media conversations have limitations and require further development. Furthermore, due to its unique morphology, developing text understanding capabilities specific to the Arabic language poses challenges.

This study demonstrates the application and effectiveness of the proposed methodology on a random sample of Twitter data from Arabic-speaking regions. Furthermore, as Arabic is the language of Islam, the study is of particular importance to Islamic and Muslim geographies, markets and marketing.

The findings suggest that the proposed methodology has a wider potential beyond the data set and health-care sector analysed, and therefore, can be applied to further markets, social media platforms and consumer segments.

To remedy these gaps, this study presents a new methodology and analytical approach to investigating Arabic language social media conversations, which brings together a multidisciplinary knowledge of technology, data science and marketing communications.

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.