irBlogs: A standard collection for studying Persian bloggers

A large number of internet users share their knowledge and opinions in online social networks like forums, weblogs, etc. This fact has attracted many researchers from different fields to study online social networks. The Persian language is one of the dominant languages in the Middle East which is the official language of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan; so, a large number of Persians are active in online social networks. Despite this fact, very few studies exist about Persian social networks. In this paper we will study the characteristics of Persian bloggers based on a new collection, named irBlogs. The collection contains nearly 5 million posts and the network of more than 560,000 Persian bloggers which assures the reliability of the results of this study. Some of the analyzed characteristics are: the similarities and the differences between formal Persian and the language style that is used by Persian bloggers, the interests of the bloggers and the impact of other web resources on Persian blogosphere. Our analysis show that IT, sports, society, culture and politics are the main interests of Persian bloggers. Also, analysis of the links that are shared by Persian bloggers shows that news agencies, knowledge-bases and other social networks have a great impact on Persian bloggers and they are interested to share multimedia content.     

Selecting feasible standard form of construction contracts using text analysis

Delivering successful projects requires establishing a well-drafted contract, through setting balanced rights and obligations. Nowadays, Standard Forms of Construction Contracts (SFCCs) are being utilized, aiming to manifest the contractual relationships between the parties. This research aims to develop a model that helps in selecting the most appropriate SFCC using text analysis and multi-criteria decision-making techniques. This research studies three SFCCs which are: 1 (FIDIC Red Book 2017, 2 (JCT Standard Building Contract with Quantities 2016, and 3) NEC4 Engineering and Construction Contract. The research compares SFCCs in terms of five aspects which are: 1) Readability, 2) Sharing common goals, 3) Loss and rewards, 4) Dealing with uncertainties, and 5) Suspension by parties. Literature emphasized that these aspects were proven to be crucial in achieving a successful contract agreement. The research starts with contract analysis to extract insights for the selected SFCCs. Where the clauses and provisions of the three SFCCs are compared based on the output of the text analysis process. Accordingly, questions are developed to assist the user in selecting the most suitable SFCC based on a hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision-Making model. Finally, a recommendation system is developed to advise the user for critical success factors to be considered in the contract formation stage. This study adds to the body of knowledge of contract management and aids in proactively avoiding or mitigating conflicts and disputes, by reducing the contractual-related problems that may take place due to inappropriate contract types or provisions.     

Correct: A simulated text editor

This paper describes a project to write a simulator for the native mode text editor of one computer, which could be run on a different computer. This was done to give a user of both computers a common editing language. The method of design and construction is presented together with brief details of the syntax and semantics of the editing language.     

Designing a new standard structure for improving automatic processing of Persian handwritten bank cheques

Millions of handwritten bank cheques are processed manually every day in banks and other financial institutions all over the world. Substitution of manual cheque processing with automatic cheque reader system saves time and the cost of processing. In the recent years, systems such as A2iA have been made in order to automate processing of Latin cheques. Normally, these systems are based on the standard structures of cheques such as Check 21 in the USA or Check 006 in Canada. There are major problems in traditional (currently used) Persian bank cheques, which yield low accuracy and computational cost in their automatic processing. In this paper, in order to solve these problems, a novel structure for Persian handwritten bank cheques is presented. Importance and supremacy of this new structure for Persian handwritten bank cheques is shown by conducting several experiments on our created database of cheques based on the new structure. The created database includes 500 handwritten bank cheques based on the presented structure. Experimental results verify the usefulness and importance of the new structure in automatic processing of Persian handwritten bank cheques which provides a standard guideline for automatic processing of Persian handwritten bank cheques comparable to Check 21 or Check 006.     

Reviews: A text for all reasons

J. Wellington. (2000). Teaching and learning secondary science: Contemporary issues and practical approaches. London: Routledge. ISBN 0–4152–1403–3     

CHEF: A versatile portable text editor

CHEF is an interactive text editor for use with both printing and display terminals. Its prime field of application is computer source program editing but it has some word processing capabilities that make it useful for documentation and general text editing work. There is a comprehensive set of whole-line operations, including block moves and the insertion of text from external files, together with substring replacement and line segmentation based on a flexible pattern-matching algorithm. There is a set of one-line buffers for temporary storage of lines or command strings and complex command sequences can be built up by macro substitution. Considerable effort has been made to design a command syntax that is flexible and consistent and, at the same time, minimizes effort during the editing process. CHEF copies the user's file into an internal work-space so that the original is not disturbed until the user is satisfied with the results of the editing session. A virtual memory technique is used to provide a work-space that can be almost any desired size, with random access to any part and efficient editing operations. CHEF is written in BCPL and has already been implemented on four different machines.     

RATS: A middle-level text utility system

Conclusion While this system does not supply all of the features we might wish, it does facilitate greatly many of the tasks that humanists and language analysts often perform. Its general flexibility should enable the user to design and implement procedures that fit his analytic model more precisely and sensitively than is generally possible. The results, hopefully, will be a greater number of computer-assisted works that are of definite substantive importance within the user's discipline.     

Texterra: A framework for text analysis

A framework for fast text analysis, which is developed as a part of the Texterra project, is described. Texterra provides a scalable solution for the fast text processing on the basis of novel methods that exploit knowledge extracted from the Web and text documents. For the developed tools, details of the project, use cases, and evaluation results are presented.     

Imbalanced text classification: A term weighting approach

The natural distribution of textual data used in text classification is often imbalanced. Categories with fewer examples are under-represented and their classifiers often perform far below satisfactory. We tackle this problem using a simple probability based term weighting scheme to better distinguish documents in minor categories. This new scheme directly utilizes two critical information ratios, i.e. relevance indicators. Such relevance indicators are nicely supported by probability estimates which embody the category membership. Our experimental study using both Support Vector Machines and Naïve Bayes classifiers and extensive comparison with other classic weighting schemes over two benchmarking data sets, including Reuters-21578, shows significant improvement for minor categories, while the performance for major categories are not jeopardized. Our approach has suggested a simple and effective solution to boost the performance of text classification over skewed data sets.     

A text editing interface: Definition and use

A simple yet flexible method of editing text is described which is applicable to all forms of character based command processing applications. The technique greatly increases the friendliness of a text driven interface but does not interfere with most existing command conventions; it can also be generalised to form the basis of a powerful and easy to use text editor. This paper describes the details and basic philosophy of the editing interface and describes its successful use in two applications (command processor and calculator) which are not normally associated with text editing requirements.     

A programmable text editor

While operating system command languages have improved in recent years, the advances have not yet been widely applied to other command interpreters. This paper describes an editor that has been given two features popular in operating system command languages — i/o redirection and programmable command files. The result is suited both to editing and to some repetitive reformatting tasks often solved by one-shot, ad hoc programs. Examples display the utility of the extensions, and implications for still other command interpreters are discussed.     

A comparative study on text representation schemes in text categorization

It is well known that the classification effectiveness of the text categorization system is not simply a matter of learning algorithms. Text representation factors are also at work. This paper will consider the ways in which the effectiveness of text classifiers is linked to the five text representation factors: “stop words removal”, “word stemming”, “indexing”, “weighting”, and “normalization”. Statistical analyses of experimental results show that performing “normalization” can always promote effectiveness of text classifiers significantly. The effects of the other factors are not as great as expected. Contradictory to common sense, a simple binary indexing method can sometimes be helpful for text categorization.     

Does SMS text messaging help or harm adults' knowledge of standard spelling?

The recent increase in short messaging system (SMS) text messaging, often using abbreviated, non‐conventional ‘textisms’ (e.g. ‘2nite’), in school‐aged children has raised fears of negative consequences of such technology for literacy. The current research used a paradigm developed by Dixon and Kaminska, who showed that exposure to phonetically plausible misspellings (e.g. ‘recieve’) negatively affected subsequent spelling performance, though this was true only with adults, not children. The current research extends this work to directly investigate the effects of exposure to textisms, misspellings and correctly spelled words on adults' spelling. Spelling of a set of key words was assessed both before and after an exposure phase where participants read the same key words, presented either as textisms (e.g. ‘2nite’), correctly spelled (e.g. ‘tonight’) or misspelled (e.g. ‘tonite’) words. Analysis showed that scores decreased from pre‐ to post‐test following exposure to misspellings, whereas performance improved following exposure to correctly spelled words and, interestingly, to textisms. Data suggest that exposure to textisms, unlike misspellings, had a positive effect on adults' spelling. These findings are interpreted in light of other recent research suggesting a positive relationship between texting and some literacy measures in school‐aged children.     

Persian Variations

The concept of variation is essential in geometric design. It is surprising that patterns very different may be variations of the same model. We define two families of pentagonal patterns with three kind of variations, and give some suggestions how to analyse these patterns and create in this style. We then search for self-similarity systems in a strict sense. Although from a systematic search, the two solutions proposed here can also generate some traditional 2-level patterns. In searching for subdivisions of the tiles into rhombuses, we found two solutions. Both can be compatible with the Binary Tiling (not with the Penrose Tiling). Then, using the concept of X-Tiles defined in a previous paper (Castera et al., http://castera.net/entrelacs/public/articles/Flying_Patterns.pdf, 2011), we find new relationship between the two families of pentagonal patterns. In the last chapter we show and comment some examples taken from traditional architecture in Iran, and infer a self-similar system for pattern with interlaces from a 2-level tiling in Isfahan. This paper reflect the point of view of a pattern designer.     

FarsBase-KBP: A knowledge base population system for the Persian Knowledge Graph

While most of the knowledge bases already support the English language, there is only one knowledge base for the Persian language, known as FarsBase, which is automatically created via semi-structured web information. Unlike English knowledge bases such as Wikidata, which have tremendous community support, the population of a knowledge base like FarsBase must rely on automatically extracted knowledge. Knowledge base population can let FarsBase keep growing in size, as the system continues working. In this paper, we present a knowledge base population system for the Persian language, which extracts knowledge from unlabelled raw text, crawled from the Web. The proposed system consists of a set of state-of-the-art modules such as an entity linking module as well as information and relation extraction modules designed for FarsBase. Moreover, a canonicalization system is introduced to link extracted relations to FarsBase properties. Then, the system uses knowledge fusion techniques with minimal intervention of human experts to integrate and filter the proper knowledge instances, extracted by each module. To evaluate the performance of the presented knowledge base population system, we present the first gold dataset for benchmarking knowledge base population in the Persian language, which consisting of 22015 FarsBase triples and verified by human experts. The evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed system.     

User-interface design for text editing: A case study

This paper describes the design of the user interface of a text editor named Occam with the goal of communicating by example the process of user-interface design. An attempt is made to induce principles; where that attempt falls, the raw details are presented. First Occam Itself Is described, and then aspects of its user Interface are used to exemplify (1) power versus ease of learning, (2) the use of prototypes and user feedback, (3) the importance of planning and (4) error detection and handling.