O n 29 March 2011 Professor Mohammed Alwan, dean of AlMustansiriya Medical School in Baghdad and my uncle, was assassinated. A bomb was planted in his car and exploded as he got in after leaving his medical practice. He was a distinguished academic and surgeon who was respected by his students, and he was a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Within a week, another clinical acad...

this article generates the first persian academic word list (pawl) which comprises the most frequently used academic vocabulary in persian academic texts. the pawl was compiled from a corpus of 927,008 running words from academic resources. two principles of range and frequency of word families guided the selection and arrangement of the word list. the corpus included seven books and one hundre...

In this paper, an automatic method for Persian WordNet construction based on Prenceton WordNet 2.1 (PWN) is introduced. The proposed approach uses Persian and English corpora as well as a bilingual dictionary in order to make a mapping between PWN synsets and Persian words. Our method calculates a score for each candidate synset of a given Persian word and for each of its translation, it select...

The Persian Gulf States (Bahrain. Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirate) have dominated the oil and gas sector since the discovery of oil in the region. They are the world largest producers of crude oil, producing about 35 and 25 percent of the world natural gas and crude oil respectively. The use of fossil fuels is directly linked to the release of CO2 into...

Background: In Western and Southwest Asia, literature is not documented on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) programs in Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The present study is the first brief review that describes HIV programs in these three neighboring countries.Methods: Data regarding the evidence of HIV programs were gathered through a systematic literature searching. English publications were r...

Although widely-studied in recent years, Language Identification (LID) systems for determining the language of input texts often fail to discriminate between similar languages like Croatian-Serbian and Malay-Indonesian. This has brought attention to the task of discriminating similar languages, varieties and dialects – including a recent shared task [3]. Persian (also known as Farsi) and Dari (...

persian scholars greatly influenced the advancement of medical sciences during the middle ages. as a review of the books surviving from that time shows, infectious diseases was one main field of interest for these scientists. among this group of health problems, rabies was specifically described by persian physicians, particularly by avicenna (980 – 1037 a.d.) in his famous “canon of medicine.”...

Persian is one of the Indo-European languages which has borrowed its script from Arabic, a member of Semitic language family. Since Persian and Arabic scripts are so similar, problems arise when we want to process an electronic text. In this paper, some of the common problems faced experimentally in developing a corpus for Persian are discussed. The sources of the problems are the Persian scrip...

works of the most prominent authors such as: Zarrindast, Isma'fl Djurdjanr, MansUr b. Muhammad b. Ahmad, Hadji Zain al-Attar, and Muhammad Arzani. Appreciating this, Richter-Bernburg puts an intense effort into the analysis of the content of each manuscript, which, unusually for collections of Persian manuscripts, is not overshadowed by the beauty of the miniatures and illustrations. This enhan...