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The purpose of this article is to present an aggregated methodology for construction of the stop word list in Farsi language and generate a generic Farsi stop word list.

The stop word list is extracted based on: syntactic classes, domain dependent, corpus statistic and expert judgments. Some of the main challenges that arise in the Farsi automatic text processing are outlined as well.

Results from the techniques are aggregated and a general Farsi stop word list containing 927 words is generated.

The created stop word list can affect the efficiency and effectiveness of retrieval and indexing process in Farsi information retrieval system, moreover, it can play an important role during Farsi text segmentation.

Our stop word extraction algorithm is a promising technique; it could be applied into other languages that they have ambiguities in automatic text segmentation.

In light of the growing number of refugees and immigrants in Canada, this paper aims to identify barriers to mental health services for newcomer immigrants and refugees in Quebec and to examine how mental health services can be improved for these populations.

In this qualitative study, semi-structured individual interviews with Farsi-speaking health professionals and focus group interviews with participants from community organizations in Quebec were conducted.

Participants, both health-care professionals and community members, reported that mental health services are not readily accessible to Farsi-speaking immigrants and refugees. Structural barriers, language barriers, cultural safety and stigma were identified as obstacles to accessing care. Recommended strategies for improving access to mental health care are discussed.

Multiple studies have found that language and cultural barriers are associated with health inequalities and under-utilization of mental health services among linguistic and ethnic minorities. However, there are limited data on many groups and contexts, and a need to better understand how language barriers affect health outcomes, service utilization, patient satisfaction or overall costs to the health system or to society. In response to this gap, the present study explores how access to mental health services for Farsi-speaking newcomers may be limited by structural and linguistic barriers and cultural differences and as well as to identify strategies that can reduce the identified barriers.

Compte tenu du nombre croissant de réfugiés et d'immigrants au Canada, cette étude vise à identifier les obstacles aux services de santé mentale pour les nouveaux arrivants immigrants et réfugiés au Québec et à examiner comment les services de santé mentale peuvent être améliorés pour ces populations.

Dans cette étude qualitative, des entretiens individuels semi-structurés avec professionnels de la santé parlant le Farsi et entretiens avec des participants des organisations communautaires au Québec ont été menées.

Les participants, tant des professionnels de la santé que des membres de la communauté, ont déclaré que les services de santé mentale sont inaccessibles aux immigrants et réfugiés parlant le Farsi. Obstacles structurels, les barrières linguistiques, la sécurité culturelle et la stigmatisation ont été identifiées comme des obstacles à l'accès aux soins. Les stratégies recommandées pour améliorer l'accès aux soins de santé mentale sont discutées.

De nombreuses études ont montré que les barrières linguistiques et culturelles sont associées à les inégalités en matière de santé et la sous-utilisation des services de santé mentale chez les minorités linguistiques et ethniques. Cependant, les données sont limitées sur de nombreux groupes et contextes, et il est nécessaire de mieux comprendre comment les barrières linguistiques ont une incidence sur les résultats de santé, l'utilisation des services, la satisfaction des patients ou les coûts globaux pour le système de santé ou à la société. En réponse à cet écarte, la présente étude examine comment l'accès aux services de santé mentale pour les nouveaux arrivants parlant le farsi peuvent être limités par des barrières structurelles et linguistiques et des différences culturelles, ainsi que d'identifier les stratégies de réduire les obstacles identifiés.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a lossy/lossless binary textual image compression method based on an improved pattern matching (PM) technique.

In the Farsi/Arabic script, contrary to the printed Latin script, letters usually attach together and produce various patterns. Hence, some patterns are fully or partially subsets of some others. Two new ideas are proposed here. First, the number of library prototypes is reduced by detecting and then removing the fully or partially similar prototypes. Second, a new effective pattern encoding scheme is proposed for all types of patterns including text and graphics. The new encoding scheme has two operation modes of chain coding and soft PM, depending on the ratio of the pattern area to its chain code effective length. In order to encode the number sequences, the authors have modified the multi‐symbol QM‐coder. The proposed method has three levels for the lossy compression. Each level, in its turn, further increases the compression ratio. The first level includes applying some processing in the chain code domain such as omission of small patterns and holes, omission of inner holes of characters, and smoothing the boundaries of the patterns. The second level includes the selective pixel reversal technique, and the third level includes using the proposed method of prioritizing the residual patterns for encoding, with respect to their degree of compactness.

Experimental results show that the compression performance of the proposed method is considerably better than that of the best existing binary textual image compression methods as high as 1.6‐3 times in the lossy case and 1.3‐2.4 times in the lossless case at 300 dpi. The maximum compression ratios are achieved for Farsi and Arabic textual images.

Only the binary printed typeset textual images are considered.

The proposed method has a high‐compression ratio for archiving and storage applications.

To the authors' best knowledge, the existing textual image compression methods or standards have not so far exploited the property of full or partial similarity of prototypes for increasing the compression ratio for any scripts. Also, the idea of combining the boundary description methods with the run‐length and arithmetic coding techniques has not so far been used.

An increasing number of migrants and refugees seeking asylum in Germany is challenging psychiatrists and psychotherapists in multiple ways. Different cultural belief systems on the causes of mental illness and their treatment have to be taken into consideration. The purpose of this study is to explore perceived causes of depression among Farsi-speaking migrants and refugees from Afghanistan and Iran, which represent two groups with a shared cultural heritage, but originating from very different regimes of mobility. Both are among the largest migrant groups coming to Germany over the past decade.

In total, 50 Iranian and 50 Afghan migrants and refugees, who arrived in Germany in the past 10 years were interviewed, using an unlabeled vignette presenting signs and symptoms of depression. The answers were then coded through inductive content analysis.

Among Iranians, there was a more significant number of causal attribution to Western psychiatric concepts, whereas Afghans attributed depression more often to the experience of being a refugee without referring to psychological concepts. These differences in attribution did, however, not affect the desire for a social distance toward depressed people. Nonetheless, a higher number of years spent in Germany was associated with less desire for social distance toward persons with depression among Afghans, but not among Iranians.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study examining perceived causes of depression with Farsi-speaking migrants in Germany and contributes to understanding tendencies in the perception of depression in non-Western migrant groups.

To examine the degree of exact and partial match between the assigned descriptors and title keywords of medical theses written in Farsi and submitted for a PhD degree.Design/methodology/approach – A sample population of 506 theses in Pediatrics, Gynecology, Cardiology and Psychiatry was randomly picked out of a total of 909 indexed in the Indexing Department of the Central Library of the Iran University of Medical Science and Health Care Services. The results obtained are compared with those reported for other documents written in Farsi and English. Where applicable, the influence of the foreign language and its structure is commented on.Findings – It is shown that the degree of match between the assigned descriptors and the title keywords is greater than 70 per cent, equaling those reported for Farsi books and Michigan University Library catalogue in USA. It is also shown that the frequency of the match has increased since 1982, indicating that the authors have become more attentive in their choice of title.Research limitations/implications – Detailed analysis of results, however, shows significant differences between the degree of exact match amongst the four categories, with psychiatry theses that use more common terms showing highest exact match findings (50 per cent).Originality/value – This paper highlights the need for a closer collaboration with medical institutions for definition of approved terms and their incorporation in indexation in order to improve findings in various medical categories.

This paper evaluates the content of Iranian primary school textbooks – as the fundamental educational tool in transmitting of key components – to highlight to what extent the content pursues the philosophy of heritage education. Heritage preservation, known to be fostering of the sustainable development, is successfully achieved through the education of young people. The philosophy of heritage education is to cultivate the sense of responsibility toward heritage preservation through the approaches of education through heritage, about heritage and for heritage in which students obtain knowledge, understand the value and develop their attitudes.

This study applies the content analysis approach to evaluate the subject textbooks of the Iranian primary school curriculum. The content analysis was conducted for 51 textbooks across nine subjects and the teacher guidebooks for the art and physical education subjects. Historic country of Iran with a rich local and world cultural and natural heritage is significant context for this study.

The findings show that, however, heritage elements are applied for conveying the content of some subjects, there is the lack of clarifying of the concept and importance of heritage and cultivating the sense of responsibility toward its preservation.

The results contribute significantly in the heritage education literature as well as improving heritage education in Iran by highlighting the key points which should be considered to design heritage education programs.

Issues of language in international business have been the focus of a growing body of theoretical and empirical work. This paper aims to contribute to this literature, focusing specifically on issues of translation. The role of translator will vary depending on the language strategy adopted, with strategies linked to differing perspectives on language in international business – mechanical, cultural and political. The paper examines these perspectives through the lens of a specific problem for transnational communication – “untranslatable” words and concepts.

Interviews were conducted with professional linguists (translators and interpreters) to explore how they dealt with issues of untranslatable but cultural salient words in their day‐to‐day work with international businesses, using the problems of translating the Farsi word tarouf into English as a case in point.

The linguists agreed that tarouf was an untranslatable word, and described their strategies to deal with this problem. The commonest strategy was avoidance, stemming from linguists' concern to maintain their professional standing with clients, a finding which reflects an emerging emphasis on the importance of context and relationships for understanding inter‐cultural communication.

The study highlights the crucial role of the translator in international business, and draws attention to the potential for cross‐cultural communication problems arising from mutual lack of awareness of culturally‐salient but inherently untranslatable words or phrases.

Effective inter‐cultural communication is an issue of great importance to wider society, and business has historically been the commonest site of such communication. The study highlights an issue of considerable importance for improving inter‐cultural communications, contributing to a growing inter‐disciplinary literature in this area.

Much of the research on language in international business has focused on the emergence of English as a lingua franca, but the present study focuses on specific issues of translation and does so in an under‐researched location, Iran. It draws attention to a problem of translation not widely discussed, and shows how important this issue can be for international business.

Pattern recognition systems often have to handle problem of large volume of training data sets including duplicate and similar training samples. This problem leads to large memory requirement for saving and processing data, and the time complexity for training algorithms. The purpose of the paper is to reduce the volume of training part of a data set – in order to increase the system speed, without any significant decrease in system accuracy.

A new technique for data set size reduction – using a version of modified frequency diagram approach – is presented. In order to reduce processing time, the proposed method compares the samples of a class to other samples in the same class, instead of comparing samples from different classes. It only removes patterns that are similar to the generated class template in each class. To achieve this aim, no feature extraction operation was carried out, in order to produce more precise assessment on the proposed data size reduction technique.

The results from the experiments, and according to one of the biggest handwritten numeral standard optical character recognition (OCR) data sets, Hoda, show a 14.88 percent decrease in data set volume without significant decrease in performance.

The proposed technique is effective for size reduction for all pictorial databases such as OCR data sets.

State-of-the-art algorithms currently used for data set size reduction usually remove samples near to class's centers, or support vector (SV) samples between different classes. However, the samples near to a class center have valuable information about class characteristics, and they are necessary to build a system model. Also, SV s are important samples to evaluate the system efficiency. The proposed technique, unlike the other available methods, keeps both outlier samples, as well as the samples close to the class centers.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze citation behaviors of students in the LIS field among a variety of local universities in Tehran.

A total of 259 MA dissertations in Library and Information Science submitted to five universities in Tehran during 2003‐2008 are examined. These universities were selected based on their location and the authors' accessibility to their university libraries. Overall, five out of nine universities in Iran which have Masters Courses in Library and Information Science were selected for this study. The data were gathered using a checklist by the author, who personally attended in university libraries and counted all dissertation references.

The study shows that students' citation behaviors are in favor of books, and Farsi e‐sources are lesser used by LIS students than English e‐sources. The total number of book citations is far more than total number of other formats. While this study could be useful in library acquisition decisions, it could also inform in areas related to issues students face in finding suitable pieces of information.

This study would be useful for educational and acquisition purposes in university libraries, since it examines citation behavior of students through a specific discipline.

The study deals with MA Library and Information Science dissertations among all universities of Tehran that teach LIS masters courses.

This paper aims to discover the effectiveness of Farsi-English query using ontology.

The present study is quasi-experimental. The sample consisted of 60 students and graduate and doctoral staff from Shiraz University and the Regional Center for Science and Technology. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to assess the level of English language proficiency of users, background knowledge and their level of satisfaction with search results before and after using ontology. Each user also evaluated the relevance of the top ten results on the Google search engine results page before and after using ontology.

The findings showed that the level of complexity of the task, the use of ontology, the interactive effect of the level of complexity of the task with the domain knowledge of the users, and the interactive effect of the level of complexity of the task with ontology, influence the effectiveness of retrieval results from the users' point of view. The results of the present study also showed that the level of complexity of the task, the use of ontology, and the interactive effect of the level of complexity of the task and the use of ontology, affect the level of user satisfaction.

The results of this research are significant in both theoretical and practical aspects. Theoretically, given the lack of research in which the interactive effect of the use of ontology has examined the level of complexity of tasks and domain knowledge of users, the present study can be considered as an attempt to improve information retrieval systems. From a practical point of view, the results of this research will help researchers and designers of information retrieval systems to understand that the use of ontologies can be used to retrieve information and improve the query and assess the needs of users and their satisfaction in this field, and ultimately, making the information retrieval process more effective.