This paper presents a preliminary study of intra-speaker and inter-speaker variability in speech production and perception with an inter-dialect investigation of acoustic vocalic space according to different phonological systems. This work aims at providing an analytic study based on individual data that might account for individual strategies. We have studied variability in vowel production an...

Arabic character recognition of handwriting is addressed. A novel approach for the Arabic Character Recognition is presented based on statistical analysis of a typical Arabic text is presented. Results showed that the sub-word in Arabic language is the basic pictorial block rather than the word. The method of approximate stroke sequence is applied for the recognition of some Arabic characters i...

This paper focuses on the automatic extraction of Arabic Named Entities (NEs) from the Arabic Wikipedia (AWP), their automatic attachment to Arabic WordNet (AWN) and their automatic link to Princeton's English WordNet (PWN). We briefly report on the current status of AWN, focusing on its rather limited NE coverage. Our proposal of automatic extension is then presented, applied and evaluated. Ke...

This paper discusses issues regarding the influence of culture on Arabic Websites. Arabic Websites from three countries serve as an initial sample for this study. Do the Websites of Arabic countries reflect their culture? How specifically? Do they share attitudes about design? Can an Arabic designer achieve what users in other cultures need and want? What are differences reflected in the differ...

In order to construct a generic grammatical resource for Arabic language, we have chosen to develop an Arabic grammar based on TAG formalism. Our choice is, especially, justified by complementarities that we have noticed between Arabic syntax and this grammatical formalism. This paper consists of two comparative studies. The first is between a set of unification grammars. The second is between ...

In TREC-10 the Berkeley group participated only in the English-Arabic cross-language retrieval (CLIR) track. One Arabic monolingual run and four English-Arabic cross-language runs were submitted. Our approach to the cross-language retrieval was to translate the English topics into Arabic using online EnglishArabic bilingual dictionaries and machine translation software. The five official runs a...

A comparison between the performance of Latin and Arabic handwritten digits recognition problems is presented. The performance of ten different classifiers is tested on two similar Arabic and Latin handwritten digits databases. The analysis shows that Arabic handwritten digits recognition problem is easier than that of Latin digits. This is because the interclass difference in case of Latin dig...

This article explains the effects of ethnic nationalism on Anglophone and Francophone migration. The rise of Québec ethnic nationalism in the 1960s dismantled the cultural division of labour, which created new opportunities for Francophones but threatened Anglophones’ traditional dominance over the Québec economy. This had negative consequences for Anglophones but positive outcomes for Francoph...

In the closing decade of the 20th century, the world is marked by increasing ecological, economic and cultural interdependence. Yet the nation state remains the dominant political form. It maintains a near monopoly over the means of violence, it is the central focus of most political struggles, and its ideological force is demonstrated by the resurgence of nationalism in many areas. The breakup...