Academic literature on the topic 'Arabic language in Sudan'

Le but de la thèse est de retracer le développement et l’évolution de l’arabe de Juba au Nord Soudan, et son expansion, grâce à l’accroissement de son usage dans la vie quotidienne, comme instrument de communication dans tous les domaines sans exception. On y décrit la situation sociolinguistique de l’arabe de Juba, dans les années récentes, et le rôle d’une nouvelle génération dans le processus de son développement spectaculaire. L’étude est descriptive, analytique, et diachronique; elle donne une image historique des débuts de son existence, à partir du Sud en direction du Nord. Il s’agit d’observer, de près, son progrès dans la société, malgré sa complexité linguistique, face à une soixantaine de langues maternelles [langues vernaculaires], dans une société multi-ethnique, multi-culturelle et géographiquement étendue; l’élargissement de son utilisation dans les occasions officielles, rassemblements populaires, etc. Il s’agit aussi d’analyser le développement de sa structure grammaticale, à partir des données récoltées du corpus. L'objectif est aussi de montrer l’évolution linguistique de l’Arabe de Juba, en particulier son usage moderne et son rapprochement de l’arabe de Khartoum (Dialecte du nord Soudan), son usage quotidien à la radio et à la télévision qui jouent un rôle incontournable. Il s’agit enfin de montrer que l’arabe de Juba a fait un grand pas dans les domaines suivants: la poésie populaire, le théâtre, la chanson, la publicité, les blagues, les programmes télévisés, le discours politique, etc. La thèse dresse le tableau de la situation actuelle de ce phénomène linguistique considérable qu’est l’extension de l’usage de l’arabe de Juba au Nord Soudan, tout en étudiant les représentations dont il est l’objet, chez les locuteurs natifs ou non. Cette étude des nouveaux visages de l’arabe de Juba n’oublie pas de s’appuyer sur l’état ancien de cette langue et sur les travaux qui lui ont été consacrés. Par ailleurs, la thèse comprend la transcription et la traduction d’un vaste corpus recueilli sur place<br>The aim of the thesis, "Use and representations of Juba Arabic in North Sudan" is to relate the development and evolution of Juba Arabic in North Sudan, and its expansion by its increasing use in everyday life as an instrument of communication in all fields without exception. The thesis describes the sociolinguistic situation of Juba Arabic, in recent years, and the role of a new generation in the process of its dramatic growth. The study is descriptive, analytical, and diachronic, giving a historical account of the beginnings of its existence, from the South up to the North. It is a close observation of its progress in society, in spite of its linguistic complexity, confronted with sixty vernacular languages in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society spreading out on a wide geographical space, the expansion of its use in formal occasions, public gatherings, etc. It analyzes the development of grammatical structure, based on collected data. The objective is also to show the evolution of Juba Arabic and its modern use and how it is getting closer to the Arabic of Khartoum [dialect of northern Sudan], as well as its daily use on radio and television which play a key role. It is also to show that Juba Arabic has taken a big step forward in the fields of folk poetry, drama, song, commercials, jokes, television programs, political speech, etc. This thesis thus draws an image of contemporary use and representations of Juba Arabic in Sudan, studying the significant linguistic phenomenon of its extension in North Sudan, as well as of how native and non native speakers look at it. It addresses the new faces of Juba Arabic, without losing to take into account the ancient state of the language and the work that had been carried out by previous scholars. Furthermore, an extensive corpus collected locally is given both in transcription and translation

This dissertation presents the first corpus-based system for translation from Arabic text into Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) for the deaf and hearing impaired, for whom it can facilitate access to conventional media and allow communication with hearing people. In addition to the familiar technical problems of text-to-text machine translation,building a system for sign language translation requires overcoming some additional challenges. First,the lack of a standard writing system requires the building of a parallel text-to-sign language corpus from scratch, as well as computational tools to prepare this parallel corpus. Further, the corpus must facilitate output in visual form, which is clearly far more difficult than producing textual output. The time and effort involved in building such a parallel corpus of text and visual signs from scratch mean that we will inevitably be working with quite small corpora. We have constructed two parallel Arabic text-to-ArSL corpora for our system. The first was built from school level language instruction material and contains 203 signed sentences and 710 signs. The second was constructed from a children's story and contains 813 signed sentences and 2,478 signs. Working with corpora of limited size means that coverage is a huge issue. A new technique was derived to exploit Arabic morphological information to increase coverage and hence, translation accuracy. Further, we employ two different example-based translation methods and combine them to produce more accurate translation output. We have chosen to use concatenated sign video clips as output rather than a signing avatar, both for simplicity and because this allows us to distinguish more easily between translation errors and sign synthesis errors. Using leave-one-out cross-validation on our first corpus, the system produced translated sign sentence outputs with an average word error rate of 36.2% and an average position-independent error rate of 26.9%. The corresponding figures for our second corpus were an average word error rate of 44.0% and 28.1%. The most frequent source of errors is missing signs in the corpus; this could be addressed in the future by collecting more corpus material. Finally, it is not possible to compare the performance of our system with any other competing Arabic text-to-ArSL machine translation system since no other such systems exist at present.

The most challenging part of natural language understanding is the representation of meaning. The current representation techniques are not sufficient to resolve the ambiguities, especially when the meaning is to be used for interrogation at a later stage. Arabic language represents a challenging field for Natural Language Processing (NLP) because of its rich eloquence and free word order, but at the same time it is a good platform to capture understanding because of its rich computational, morphological and grammar rules. Among different representation techniques, Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) theory is found to be best suited for this task because of its structural approach. LFG lays down a computational approach towards NLP, especially the constituent and the functional structures, and models the completeness of relationships among the contents of each structure internally, as well as among the structures externally. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, such as knowledge representation and inferencing, enhances the capture of meaning by utilising domain specific common sense knowledge embedded in the model of domain of discourse and the linguistic rules that have been captured from the Arabic language grammar. This work has achieved the following results: (i) It is the first attempt to apply the LFG formalism on a full Arabic declarative text that consists of more than one paragraph. (ii) It extends the semantic structure of the LFG theory by incorporating a representation based on the thematic-role frames theory. (iii) It extends to the LFG theory to represent domain specific common sense knowledge. (iv) It automates the production process of the functional and semantic structures. (v) It automates the production process of domain specific common sense knowledge structure, which enhances the understanding ability of the system and resolves most ambiguities in subsequent question-answer sessions.

works such as Smart 1990, Hobrom 1996, Wiswal 2002, Gomaa 2007, Almoaily 2008, Naess 2008, Bakir 2010, and Alshammari 2010. Importantly, since GPA is spoken by a non-indigenous workforce over a wide geographical area in a multi-ethnic speech community, language variation seems inevitable. However, to date, there is no account of variation in GPA conditioned by substrate language or length of stay. Therefore, in this thesis I analyse the impact of the first language of the speakers and the number of years of residency in their location in the Gulf as potential factors conditioning language variation in GPA. The data-base for the study consists of interviews with sixteen informants from three linguistic backgrounds: Malayalam, Bengali, and Punjabi. Interviews were conducted in two cities in Saudi Arabia: Riyadh and Alkharj. Half of the data is produced by informants who have spent five or less years in the Gulf while the other half has spent ten or more years in the Gulf by the time they were interviewed. The analysis is based on ten morpho-syntactic phenomena: free or bound object or possessive pronoun, presence or absence of the Arabic definiteness marker, presence or absence of Arabic conjunction markers, presence or absence of the GPA copula, and presence or absence of agreement in the verb phrase and the noun phrase. Given the fact that most of the current theories on contact languages have been made on the basis of Indo-European language based pidgins and creoles, analysing the above features in an Arabic-based pidgin promises to be a great addition to the literature of pidgins and creoles. Results of this thesis show that both first language and number of years of stay in the Gulf seem to have little effect on my informants’ choices as regards the studied morpho-syntactic features. There is a significant adaptation to the system of Gulf Arabic (the lexifier language) only with respect to one feature: conjunction markers. This finding could be taken to support Universalist theories of the emergence of contact languages. However, some substratal effect can still be noticed in the data.

Includes abstract.<br>Includes bibliographical references.<br>This thesis attempts to address the problem of mixed querying in CLIR. It proposes mixed-language (language-aware) approaches in which mixed queries are used to retrieve most relevant documents, regardless of their languages. To achieve this goal, however, it is essential firstly to suppress the impact of most problems that are caused by the mixed-language feature in both queries and documents and which result in biasing the final ranked list. Therefore, a cross-lingual re-weighting model was developed. In this cross-lingual model, term frequency, document frequency and document length components in mixed queries are estimated and adjusted, regardless of languages, while at the same time the model considers the unique mixed-language features in queries and documents, such as co-occurring terms in two different languages. Furthermore, in mixed queries, non-technical terms (mostly those in non-English language) would likely overweight and skew the impact of those technical terms (mostly those in English) due to high document frequencies (and thus low weights) of the latter terms in their corresponding collection (mostly the English collection). Such phenomenon is caused by the dominance of the English language in scientific domains. Accordingly, this thesis also proposes reasonable re-weighted Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) so as to moderate the effect of overweighted terms in mixed queries.

Three longitudinal case studies were conducted to investigate developmental language impairment (1)1.1) in Egyptian Arabic (EA). While there have been descriptions of adult acquired aphasic deficits in Arabic, this study details the linguistic characteristics of children with impairments specific to language. To select the subjects, an exclusionary checklist was used based on the criteria used for specific language impairment (SLI, Ixronard, 1998). The subjects consisted of two males and one female, first seen at less than 5 (X) years and recorded longitudinally (21 -36 months). Data from 12 normally developing children, aged between 1 00 4,04 years, was also collected for comparative purposes and to detail normal developmental errors in EA. Patterns of language impairment and development were investigated using spontaneous language measures and specific structured tasks. The language samples were phonetically transcribed from video tapes during non-directive therapy and parent child play sessions. The spontaneous language measures included, Mean Morphemes per Unit (MPU), percent structural errors, functional analysis of utterances and an error analysis of specific grammatical morphemes. 'Ihe three EA-DLI children shared similar patterns of errors although cognitively they had different strengths. 'Their patterns of impairment reflected primarily morpho-syntactic difficulties. Many of the linguistic characteristics observed in the EA-DLI children's language were also produced by the controls, but less frequendy. The EA-DLI children's MPUs were found to be restricted with higher percentages of morphological errors than the language matched controls. An unmarked default verb form resembling the Imperfective-stem was a frequent substitution error. The functional analysis revealed that the EA-DLI children were similar to the controls in their use of requests and labels, however they produced more Learnt Repetitive phrases and disordered sentences and fewer Intravcrbals due to their difficulties with abstract verbal reasoning. 'ihe difficulties described in this study compnse of some linguistic features specific to EA and other features that have been reported in cross-linguistic studies of SLI. The shared features included difficulty with grammatical morphology, lack of master)' at expected developmental stages and limited use of inflectional morphology leading to agreement errors. Verbs were difficult, percentages of errors were high and fewer verbs were produced than nouns. In contrast to the findings of SLI in other languages Tense and Aspectual marking was not problematic, but difficulty was with subject verb agreement for gender, number and person. Prepositions, pronouns, plurals and negative particles were either omitted or substituted resulting in error patterns. The grammatical theories developed to account for SLI reported in English, German and Swedish (Hakansson et al., 2003 Clahsen and Hansen, 1997 van der Lely, 2002) were judged against the evidence acquired in this study on the three EA-DLI children. The limitations of these theories are discussed and alternative interpretations are provided.