13 research outputs found
Diya of the Miseria Tribe after the Abolition of Native Administration
No full textThis paper had been presented for promotion at the University of Khartoum. To get the full text please contact the other at [email protected]• Diya (blood money) is normally paid in murder cases to the family of the victim and Miseria calls it ‘mihaya al-dam’ which means in Arabic (the blood eraser). It is paid in all cases irrespective whether the accused is convicted or acquitted. If accepted no revenge shall take place and it hence acts as a deterrence mechanism for further violence. Before diya is agreed upon and paid tribal conciliation ‘sulh’ is required between the family of the accused and the family of the victims. The author argues that conciliation is normally accomplished through Agaweed (credible conciliators) normally agreed upon by both parties to the conflict.
• Miseria have two types of diya: (a) diya of ‘Saf’ and; (b)diya of ‘Badna’. However, the mount of diya varies and depends on the gravity of the crime. For example, murder in the context of tribal fight or intentional murder requires payment of 60 cows if the victim is a male and 30 cows if the victim is a female. In cases of manslaughter or unintentional murder diya is 30 cows for a male victim and 15 cows for a female victim. Other types of compensation fall short of diya are applied in cases of grievous bodily harm (GBH), deliberate limb amputation or loss of body parts (i.e. eye, nose, ear, teeth etc..) 30 cows is payable if the aggrieved person is a male and 15 cows if a female.
• When diya is paid to members of the family of the victim, they are prohibited to take any sort of revenge otherwise social sanctions will be imposed on them and the family will regarded as socially outcast and no longer belongs to the tribe. The author argues that the system of diya as practiced by the Meseria tribe has assumed a vital role in resolving social and communal disputes particularly in the absence of the Police in the tribal areas to maintain law and order.
• The author then highlights obstacles facing the implementation of the diya system after its abolition. He argues that in the past Nazir of the tribe, aided by Omda, is a key figure in the administration and distribution of the diya system and his role as a presiding Judge of Native Court as regulated by the Administration of Courts Act. This Act empowers or entrusts native courts to apply customary law when adjudicating cases. However, after the abolition of native administration, the role of the tribal justice was weakened and undermined. The author then has raised serious questions such as whether government local councils will be able to replace it, particularly the Local Popular Government Act entrusted the executive councils to engage in arbitration and tribal conciliation ( section 5 (10)
An automatically built named entity lexicon for Arabic
No full textWe have successfully adapted and extended the automatic Multilingual, Interoperable Named Entity Lexicon approach to Arabic, using Arabic WordNet (AWN) and Arabic Wikipedia (AWK). First, we extract AWN’s instantiable nouns and identify the corresponding categories and hyponym subcategories in AWK. Then, we exploit Wikipedia inter-lingual links to locate correspondences between articles in ten different languages in order to identify Named Entities (NEs). We apply keyword search on AWK abstracts to provide for Arabic articles that do not have a correspondence in any of the other languages. In addition, we perform a post-processing step to fetch further NEs from AWK not reachable through AWN. Finally, we investigate diacritization using matching with geonames databases, MADA-TOKAN tools and different heuristics for restoring vowel marks of Arabic NEs. Using this methodology, we have extracted approximately 45,000 Arabic NEs and built, to the best of our knowledge, the largest, most mature and well-structured Arabic NE lexical resource to date. We have stored and organised this lexicon following the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) ISO standard. We conduct a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the lexicon against a manually annotated gold standard and achieve precision scores from
95.83% (with 66.13% recall) to 99.31% (with 61.45% recall) according to different values of a threshold
Examples of the image of the mother in Arabic – Islamic heritage
No full textLa madre es el núcleo de varias obras literarias universales como la novela del ruso Máximo Gorki “La Madre”, o algunas obras de otros autores como el francés François Mauriac, el checo Karel Capek y el alemán Bertold Brecht. El Islam la sitúa en un lugar destacado; tanto el Corán como la tradición profética mandan que sea tratada con gran humanidad por sus sacrificios por los hijos en el embarazo, la lactancia y la educación. La poesía árabe le consagra muchos textos que elogian su papel y reconocen su labor y sus virtudes. Tanto autores clásicos como contemporáneos han escrito poemas en su alabanza como Abu Firas al-Hamdani, al-Sharif al-Radi, al-Ma’arri, al-Qarawi, Ibrahim Mundir y ‘Abd Allah al-Baraduni. Asimismo, la novela árabe aborda la figura de la madre en sus diferentes facetas, aunque domina su imagen de mujer sumisa, obediente y semianalfabeta. Otro tipo de textos breves escritos por autores como Yubran, Amin Mushriq, al-Mazini…, son quizá los más profundos y expresivos en describir los sentimientos de la madre hacia sus hijos. Y por último, la palabra madre se ha convertido en árabe en sinónimo de “origen” o “raíz”, usándose en su significado metafórico para denominar nombres propios o conceptos, como “Umm al-Qurà” (La Meca), Umm Qash’am (la muerte) o “Umm al-Jaba’ith” (el alcohol).“Mother” is the core - centre represented in many international literary texts. The Russian author Gorki’s novel “Mother” took the lead among the best international literary works. He was followed by many other writers in various cultures. They took the notion “mother” as a basic topic in their works such as François Mauriac and the Czeck author Karl Capek and the German Berthold Brecht. In Islam “the mother” enjoys a magnificent status since the holy Qur’an and the prophet’s tradition urge on treating her kindly in a highly respective – humanitarian way, for her great sacrifices and her caring for her children during pregnancy, breast-feeding and bringing up. Many texts in Arabic poetry were devoted to “the mother”; glorifying her role and her position in recognition of her graces. Prominent old and modern Arab poets wrote poems expressing gratitude and high appreciation of “the mother”. Among them are Abu Firas Al-Hamdani, Al-Shareef Al-Radhi, Al-Muaari, Al-Shaaer Al-Qurawi (Rasheed Saleem Al-Khouri), Ibraheem Munther, Abdulla Al-Bardooni and many more. Arabic novels deal with “the mother” and drawn her portrait in various states that are overlapping and surpassing her traditional role as “subjugated, obedient and semi literate”. Many texts occur as a stream of consciousness that are probably the most effective literary works in reflecting “mother’s” portrait as being truthful in expressing and conveying her emotions and love towards her children and family. Among the Arab authors of such texts are Gibran Khaleel Gibran, Ameen Mushriq and Al- Mazini. Finally, the word ”mother” in Arabic was used to mean the root or origin and thus it became the nickname for many notions and names of places such as Um Al-Qura (Mecca), Um Qashaam (death), Um Al-Khabaaeth (alcohol)
Introducing the Arabic WordNet Project
No full textArabic is the official language of hundreds of millions of people in twenty Middle East and northern African countries, and is the religious language of all Muslims of various ethnicities around the world. Surprisingly little has been done in the field of computerised language and lexical resources. It is therefore motivating to develop an Arabic (WordNet) lexical resource that discovers the richness of Arabic as described in Elkateb (2005). This paper describes our approach towards building a lexical resource in Standard Arabic. Arabic WordNet (AWN) will be based on the design and contents of the universally accepted Princeton WordNet (PWN) and will be mappable straightforwardly onto PWN 2.0 and EuroWordNet (EWN), enabling translation on the lexical level to English and dozens of other languages. Several tools specific to this task will be developed. AWN will be a linguistic resource with a deep formal semantic foundation. Besides the standard wordnet representation of senses, word meanings are defined with a machine understandable semantics in first order logic. The basis for this semantics is the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and its associated domain ontologies. We will greatly extend the ontology and its set of mappings to provide formal terms and definitions equivalent to each synset
Global Optimization Using Piecewise Linear Approximation
No full textabstract: Global optimization (programming) has been attracting the attention of researchers for almost a century. Since linear programming (LP) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP) had been well studied in early stages, MILP methods and software tools had improved in their efficiency in the past few years. They are now fast and robust even for problems with millions of variables. Therefore, it is desirable to use MILP software to solve mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems. For an MINLP problem to be solved by an MILP solver, its nonlinear functions must be transformed to linear ones. The most common method to do the transformation is the piecewise linear approximation (PLA). This dissertation will summarize the types of optimization and the most important tools and methods, and will discuss in depth the PLA tool. PLA will be done using nonuniform partitioning of the domain of the variables involved in the function that will be approximated. Also partial PLA models that approximate only parts of a complicated optimization problem will be introduced. Computational experiments will be done and the results will show that nonuniform partitioning and partial PLA can be beneficial.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Mathematics 202
White matter abnormalities in 15 subjects with SPG76
No full textBackground and objectives: Hereditary spastic paraplegias (HSPs) are heterogenous genetic disorders characterized by progressive pyramidal tract involvement. SPG76 is a recently identified form of HSP, caused by biallelic calpain-1 (CAPN1) variants. The most frequently described MRI abnormality in SPG76 is mild cerebellar atrophy and non-specific white matter abnormalities were reported in only one case. Following the identification of prominent white matter abnormalities in a subject with CAPN1 variants, which delayed the diagnosis, we aimed to verify the presence of MRI patterns of white matter involvement specific to this HSP. Methods: We performed a retrospective radiological qualitative analysis of 15 subjects with SPG76 (4 previously unreported) initially screened for white matter involvement. Moreover, we performed quantitative analyses in our proband with available longitudinal studies. Results: We observed bilateral, periventricular white matter involvement in 12 subjects (80%), associated with multifocal subcortical abnormalities in 5 of them (33.3%). Three subjects (20%) presented only multifocal subcortical involvement. Longitudinal quantitative analyses of our proband revealed increase in multifocal white matter lesion count and increased area of periventricular white matter involvement over time. Discussion: SPG76 should be added to the list of HSPs with associated white matter abnormalities. We identified periventricular white matter involvement in subjects with SPG76, variably associated with multifocal subcortical white matter abnormalities. These findings, in the presence of progressive spastic paraparesis, can mislead the diagnostic process towards an acquired white matter disorder. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany
Annotation of conceptual co-reference and text Mining the Qur'an
No full textThis research contributes to the area of corpus annotation and text mining by developing novel domain specific language resources. Most practical text mining applications restrict their domain. This research restricts the domain to the Qur'anic Text.
In this thesis, a number of pre-processing steps were undertaken and annotation information were added to the Qur'an. The raw Arabic Qur'an was pre-processed into morphological units using the Qur'anic Arabic Corpus (QAC). Qur'anic terms were indexed and converted into a vector space model using techniques in Information Retrieval (IR). In parallel, nearly 24,000 Qur'anic personal pronouns were annotated with information on their referents. These referents are consolidated and organized into a total of over 1,000 ontological concepts. Moreover, a dataset of nearly 8,000 pairs of related Qur'anic verses are compiled from books of scholarly commentary on the Qur'an. This vector space model, the pronoun tagging, the verse relatedness dataset, and the part-of-speech tags available in QAC all together served for a number of Qur'anic text mining applications which were rendered online for public use. Among these applications: lemma concordance, collocation, POS search of the Qur'an, verse similarity measures, concept clouds of a given verse, pronominal anaphora and Qur'anic chapter similarity.
Furthermore, machine learning experiments were conducted on automatic detection of verse similarity/relatedness as well as categorization of Qur'anic chapters based on their chronology of revelation. Domain specific linguistic features were investigated to induct learning algorithms. Results show that deep linguistic and world knowledge is needed to reach the human upper bound in certain computational tasks such as detecting text relatedness, question answering and textual entailment. However, many useful queries can be addressed using text mining techniques and layers of annotations made available through this research. The works presented here can be extended to include other similar texts like Hadith (i.e., saying of Prophet Muhammad), or other scriptures like the Gospels
Novel circuit design for high-impedance and non-local electrical measurements of two-dimensional materials
No full textThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from AIP Publishing via the DOI in this recordTwo-dimensional materials offer a novel platform for the development
of future quantum technologies. However, the electrical characterisation of
topological insulating states, non-local resistance and bandgap tuning in atomically thin
materials, can be strongly affected by spurious signals arising from the measuring
electronics. Common-mode voltages, dielectric leakage in the coaxial cables and the
limited input impedance of alternate-current amplifiers can mask the true nature of
such high-impedance states. Here, we present an optical isolator circuit which grants
access to such states by electrically decoupling the current-injection from the voltagesensing
circuitry. We benchmark our apparatus against two state-of-the-art measurements:
the non-local resistance of a graphene Hall bar and the transfer characteristic
of a WS2 field-effect transistor. Our system allows the quick characterisation of novel
insulating states in two-dimensional materials with potential applications in future
quantum technologies.J.D.M. acknowledges financial support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council (EPSRC) of the United Kingdom, via the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training
in Metamaterials (Grant No. EP/L015331/1). S.F.R acknowledges financial support
from the Higher Committee for Education Development in Iraq (HCED). S.R. and M.F.C.
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acknowledge financial support from EPSRC (Grant no. EP/K010050/1, EP/M001024/1,
EP/M002438/1), from Royal Society international Exchanges Scheme 2016/R1, from The
Leverhulme trust (grant title ”Quantum Revolution”). A.D.S, S.R. and M.F.C. acknowledge
financial support from Royal Society international Exchanges Grant ”Energy Harvesting
Fabric”
Strain-engineering of twist-angle in graphene/hBN superlattice devices
No full textThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available on open access from American Chemical Society via the DOI in this recordThe observation of novel physical phenomena such as Hofstadter’s butterfly, topological currents, and unconventional superconductivity in graphene has been enabled by the replacement of SiO2 with hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) as a substrate and by the ability to form superlattices in graphene/hBN heterostructures. These devices are commonly made by etching the graphene into a Hall-bar shape with metal contacts. The deposition of metal electrodes, the design, and specific configuration of contacts can have profound effects on the electronic properties of the devices possibly even affecting the alignment of graphene/hBN superlattices. In this work, we probe the strain configuration of graphene on hBN in contact with two types of metal contacts, two-dimensional (2D) top-contacts and one-dimensional edge-contacts. We show that top-contacts induce strain in the graphene layer along two opposing leads, leading to a complex strain pattern across the device channel. Edge-contacts, on the contrary, do not show such strain pattern. A finite-elements modeling simulation is used to confirm that the observed strain pattern is generated by the mechanical action of the metal contacts clamped to the graphene. Thermal annealing is shown to reduce the overall doping while increasing the overall strain, indicating an increased interaction between graphene and hBN. Surprisingly, we find that the two contact configurations lead to different twist-angles in graphene/hBN superlattices, which converge to the same value after thermal annealing. This observation confirms the self-locking mechanism of graphene/hBN superlattices also in the presence of strain gradients. Our experiments may have profound implications in the development of future electronic devices based on heterostructures and provide a new mechanism to induce complex strain patterns in 2D materials.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)Royal SocietyNewton FundLeverhulme TrustHigher Committee for Education Development in Iraq (HCED)Royal Academy of Engineerin
