We apply topic modeling to classifying the genre of Ghazal, a form common in Persian poetry. We show that a classifier based on automatically-generated topics exposes important information with only a small performance penalty: the top discriminative topics can be manually aligned with themes prevalent in the associated genres, as identified by scholars of literature. We also weigh in on a long...

Thomas Bauer seems very much intent on discrediting my chapter on Mamluk and Ottoman poetry (in the Post-Classical Period volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, edited by Roger Allen and D. S. Richards and published in 2006), which apparently contradicts the premises and ideas he himself had already put forward about this long period, one that happens to be his chosen area of spe...

In this paper, several new universal preprocessing techniques are described to improve Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM) compression of UTF-8 encoded natural language text. These methods essentially adjust the alphabet in some manner (for example, by expanding or reducing it) prior to the compression algorithm then being applied to the amended text. Firstly, a simple bigraphs (two-byte) subs...

The presence of a large number of unique shapes called ligatures in cursive languages, along with variations due to scaling, orientation and location provides one of the most challenging pattern recognition problems. Recognition of the large number of ligatures is often a complicated task in oriental languages such as Pashto, Urdu, Persian and Arabic. Research on cursive script recognition ofte...

The purpose of this article is to determine the phonemic status of [h] and [ʔ] in the Sistani dialect of Miyankangi. Auditory tests applied to the relevant data show that [ʔ] occurs mainly in word-initial position, where it stands in free variation with Ø. The only place where [h] is heard is in Arabic and Persian loanwords, and only in the pronunciation of some speakers who are educated and/or...

يعدُّ هذا البحث دراسة دلالية في الشعر العربي القديم بهدف رصد التغيرات التي طرأت على الألفاظ تناولها الشعراء شعرهم، وقد اتبع المنهج الاستقرائي/ الاستنباطي بيان حركة هذه وأصولها واستعمالاتها، ثمّ استنباط ما طرأ عليها من تغيير دلالي إمّا بتعميم دلالتها لتشمل عددًا أكبر المدلولات والمعاني، وإمّا بتضيق لتقتصر معنى واحد المعاني الكثيرة دُوِّنت أصل وضعها، أن ترتقي لتأخذَ أسمى المعنى الذي وُضِعت له، العكس بأنَّ تنحّط...