non-Roman Alphabets Research Articles

A design approach for a distributed system to handle Chinese

In designing systems to handle non-Roman alphabet languages, unique problems in information retrieval are encountered. The concept of "P-trees” will be explained and compared to B-trees. Experiences in applying P-trees to non-Roman alphabet retrieval environments will be covered in detail.

A novel steganography method using transliteration of Bengali text

In this paper, we present a simple and novel approach for steganography through transliteration. A phonetic keyboard layout is very popular for writing languages having non-roman alphabets. Bengali, a language spoken by 230 million people, is a fair example and in this work we utilize Bengali digital text for data hiding by the proposed technique. For several characters in the Bengali alphabet, there are multiple options to represent a character in it’s equivalent roman form using a phonetic keyboard layout. The main idea of the proposed method is to exploit this special feature of Bengali phonetic keyboard layouts to hide secret information in form of bits. One of these options can be used to represent the bit ‘0’ and the other option can represent the bit ‘1’ in a document without any risk of understanding by any intermediate user. The results show that the proposed method is very prominent to be a successful steganography technique. Steganalysis results show that the capacity of the method is 1.2%, which is adequate for a text steganography system with very low risk of machine detection. This method can be easily adapted and applied for any other language having non-roman alphabet.

A Comparison between Rule and Dictionary Based Romanization of Arabic Names

Romanization is used to phonetically translate names and technical terms from languages in non-Roman alphabets to languages in Roman alphabets. Because almost all dictionaries contain standard English forms for some Arabic names, this problem has been solved using machine transliteration. Several programs exist to deal with transliteration; they are based either on dictionary-based approach or on rule-based approach. In this study, a comparison between these two approaches is shown. Test data from the Yarmouk University library were used. Results show that while a rule-based Romanizer can romanize all names, a dictionary-based Romanizer romanizes (86%) of tested names. On the other hand, another kind of test was performed over the Romanization rules used by each Romanizer; the results show that the Romanization rules (in terms of accuracy and usability) used by the Dictionary-based Romanizer used in this study are better than the ones used by Rule-based Romanizer.

Commonly taught and less commonly taught language learners: are they equally prepared for CALL and online language learning?

In this study, we present the analyses stemming from a survey administered to 2149 foreign language learners at Michigan State University. We had three goals. First, we aimed to compile a profile of language learners' technological acumen, access to and ownership of technology, and the current uses of technology across a wide range of languages being studied. Second, we wanted to investigate whether learners, when grouped by language of study (commonly taught or less-commonly taught), differed in their knowledge, ownership, or uses of technology. Third, we wanted to relate these data to the learners' receptiveness to a proposed increase in the amount of technology used for language instruction. Significant differences in the variables were found in terms of level of academic study and the classification of the language being learned (commonly taught versus less-commonly taught and Roman alphabet versus non-Roman alphabet). These differences reflect the recent discussions on the preparedness of students for increases in computer-assisted language learning and hybrid and distance language classes.

Script Charisma in Hebrew and Turkish: A Comparative Framework for Explaining Success and Failure of Romanization

Romanization is a particular form of script conversion and refers to the process by which a Roman-based alphabet is created for a language previously written with either a nonalphabetic script or a non-Roman alphabet. Nearly half the world’s population today uses the Roman alphabet, and since the late nineteenth century, it has become a charismatic script, to use Max Weber’s term, expanding out of its traditional base in Western Christendom. In addition to the success stories in Romania, Vietnam, and Turkey, there have been numerous attempts to Romanize local scripts in Japan, India, China, and Greece, to cite a few examples, which ended up as failures. This article aims at providing a theoretical framework for explaining success and failure of Romanization through a comparative, in-depth study of two speech communities, Hebrew and Turkish. Independent variables such as harmony between language and script, level of literacy, costs of change, past experiences of script conversion, regime type, availability of canonical texts, and attitudes toward the West are discussed as factors that influence the choice of script.

Measurement of episodic memory using word tasks in Roman and non-Roman alphabet languages: Validation from a multicentre clinical trial

Measurement of episodic memory using word tasks in Roman and non-Roman alphabet languages: Validation from a multicentre clinical trial

Further Advantages of a Unique Author Identification Number

I am in complete agreement with the suggestion by Matthew Falagas [1] that a unique author identification number (UAIN) would represent a major improvement for the use of databases of scientific publications. In this regard, I perceive that he has not mentioned several other important advantages that a UAIN system would provide, and that are worth pointing to: 1. When looking up someone's publications, the fact that the last name of a given person can vary from one paper to another can be as much of a problem as that of multiple authors with the same name. For example, these variations include women who change their last name after getting married (or divorced), middle initials that are sometimes included or omitted, translations from non-Roman alphabets that result in variable spellings, and people with last names composed of several terms that can sometimes appear in databases as split or truncated. 2. Contrarily to M. Falagas, I do not see any good reason why a UAIN system could not be retroactive. It is clearly in every scientist's interest to facilitate the job of other people who want to look up their work. I therefore believe that authors could be asked to register for a UAIN, and to validate their list of publications themselves, retroactively. Even for the most productive scientists, this would take only a few minutes, and the fact that they had registered for a UAIN allowing users to trace their whole list of publications could then be indicated in the display of search results from the various bibliographic databases. I also do not see any reason for “hiding” this UAIN. I suggest that it could be designed to be quite simple to remember and to communicate to others, for example: the first four or five letters of the last name followed by the initial of the first name followed by the year of first scientific publication followed by an incremental number depending on order of registration (my UAIN would be JOLY-E-89-01). It would therefore be something quite comparable in length and spirit to a car's licence plate and, like UK licence plates, it would provide an interesting clue regarding the seniority of its bearer. 3. This type of UAIN would therefore provide a very simple way to assess a person's productivity. It would also provide a very useful means to assess the actual impact of their work in terms of citations, by discriminating between self-citation and citations by others. Today, most people are evaluated via the impact factor of the journals in which they have managed to publish their work, and not by the actual impact of the papers themselves. Although most scientists acknowledge that this is an extremely crude and unfair way of assessing the quality of someone's production, the impact factor lives on. By providing the simple means to track someone's bibliographic record and thus facilitate the evaluation of their productivity, I believe that the introduction of a UAIN system will not only help the scientific community to exploit bibliographic databases more efficiently, but also represent a major step towards getting rid of the despotic domination of the dreaded impact factors of journals as a means to evaluate the quality of scientific papers.

An ensemble of transliteration models for information retrieval

Transliteration is used to phonetically translate proper names and technical terms especially from languages in Roman alphabets to languages in non-Roman alphabets such as from English to Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. Because transliterations are usually representative index terms for documents, proper handling of the transliterations is important for an effective information retrieval system. However, there are limitations on handling transliterations depending on dictionary lookup, because transliterations are usually not registered in the dictionary. For this reason, many researchers have been trying to overcome the problem using machine transliteration. In this paper, we propose a method for improving machine transliteration using an ensemble of three different transliteration models. Because one transliteration model alone has limitation on reflecting all possible transliteration behaviors, several transliteration models should be complementary used in order to achieve a high-performance machine transliteration system. This paper describes a method about transliteration production using the several machine transliteration models and transliteration ranking with web data and relevance scores given by each transliteration model. We report evaluation results for our ensemble transliteration model and experimental results for its impact on IR effectiveness. Machine transliteration tests on English-to-Korean transliteration and English-to-Japanese transliteration show that our proposed method achieves 78–80% word accuracy. Information retrieval tests on KTSET and NTCIR-1 test collection show that our transliteration model can improve the performance of an information retrieval system about 10–34%.

Translations and Transformations: Thai Texts for Children in the USA

Very few Thai-language works have been published in the US. While English-language works by Thai American authors are limited to cookbooks of Thai cuisine and the occasional book on Thai kick-boxing, Thai-language works are limited for the most part to newspapers (for example, the Los Angeles-based Saereechai and Madhichon), magazines (including Siam Media and Inter Thai), and newsletters produced by religious or social organizations (including Wat Thai in Los Angeles). A few texts on Buddhism include Pra Prayudh Payutto's Buddhadhamma: Natural Laws and Values for Life by G.A. Olson and published by the State University of New York as part of its series in Buddhist Studies, and A. Sujata's Beginning to See. Yet very few Thai books have been published in the US because of the technological difficulties presented by a non-Roman alphabet and by the limitations of a small, widely-dispersed immigrant group. Adapted in the late thirteenth century from a Khmer script derived from the Indian Devanagari script, Thai uses an alphabet of 44 consonants, 32 vowels, four tone marks, and various other symbols for punctuation and numbers. Even with widespread personal computing technology, Thai remains a difficult script to render, and software packages designed for the Thai language, although produced in the United States, are typically available only in Thailand. Indeed, software packages alone are insufficient without a Thai-character keyboard. The technological obstacles to printing Thai, however, do not provide a sufficient explanation for the small number of Thai-language works produced in the US. Ideographic languages such as Chinese, for example, are potentially more difficult to produce than a phonetic language such as Thai, and Chinese-language texts were produced in the United States as early as the 1870s. An obvious explanation for the relative abundance of Chinese-language texts as compared to Thai-language texts is the smaller number of Thai-speakers in the United States. The 1990 census counted about 90,000 Thai immigrants in the US, 1.3% of the Asian American population, or .05% of the total population. In contrast, the 1990 census found 1.6 million Chinese-speaking immigrants, almost twenty times larger than the Thai group. Spanish-speaking immigrants comprise an even greater portion of the US population at 11.1%, or 29.7 million people (1990 Census, US Census Bureau). German Americans represented a similarly large immigrant group, with over five million German Americans in the US in 1914. Moreover, Thai immigrants are not concentrated in one central geographic location, but are spread throughout the US. The Thai-American population is also very small compared to the population of Thailand, estimated at 53 million. Although books such as Loy Kratong (1981) and I am a Thai (1983) that describe different Thai cultural traditions are published in Thailand, they are written to be easily accessible to both Thai-and American-born children. Works of American origin, like A Guide to Learning the Thai Language (1988), (1) tend to focus more on language instruction but also include cultural elements. Yet regardless of their Asian or American origins, Thai children's texts offer evidence for an alternative theory explaining the small size of the body of Thai American literature. What becomes apparent in these texts is an ambivalent relationship to language, one in which language can and does exist independently of social identity or culture. Unlike early German American works, which insisted upon a learning of the German language, and unlike Spanish-language works, which explicitly state their goals of teaching Spanish, Thai-language works lack a clear conviction that teaching Thai is essential to maintaining a Thai identity. Instead, Thai-language children's literature exhibits a strikingly unusual resignation to the difficulties of teaching Thai, and also a tacit understanding that teaching the Thai language is subordinate to a larger goal of preserving Thai culture. …

Effects of Variations in Orthographic Information on Asian and American Readers' English Text Reading.

Orthographies vary in the support they provide for word identification based on grapheme-phoneme correspondences. If skills developed in acquisition of first-language (L1) reading transfer to reading English as a foreign language (EFL), the extent to which EFL readers' word identification shows reliance on information other than grapheme-phoneme correspondences could be expected to vary with whether their L1 orthography is a non-Roman alphabet such as Korean hangul or a nonalphabetic (morpho-syllabic) system such as Chinese characters. Another influence could be whether EFL readers have learned to read a morpho-syllabic L1 by means of an alphabetic transliteration. English text reading speeds and oral reading quality ratings of three groups of adult Asian EFL readers attending an American university were compared with those of two groups of American L1 readers: Graduate student peers and eighth-grade students. All EFL groups read more slowly than both groups of L1 readers, and their reading was more impaired when orthographic cues were disrupted by mixed case print or pseudohomophone spellings. Some of these effects were reduced in EFL readers from Hong Kong, who had earlier exposure to English. Contrary to previous findings, no effects could be attributed to type of first orthography or early exposure to alphabetic transliteration of Chinese characters, which differentiated the Taiwanese and Hong Kong groups. As a whole, the results suggest that, at least across the L1 groups studied, differences in EFL word reading are associated less with type of L1 orthography than with history of exposure to English.

The internationalization of MARC ‐ part IV: UNIMARC, some formats based on it and some other MARC formats

Discusses some of the problems associated with the requirements and the prospects for international standards for the exchange of bibliographic records in machine‐readable form: the various roles of national bibliographies and national libraries; a lack of international cataloging standards; a lack of an international subject control system; language difficulties; character sets and codes; and nonroman alphabets. Explains that these problems lie behind the development of various MARC formats out of UNIMARC. In this final part of a four‐part article, describes the formats for South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, Croatia and Germany and indicates the points of difference and local requirements.

Inclusion of Nonroman Character Sets

The following document was prepared bystaff of the Library of Congress as a workingpaper for discussions on incorporating the techniques described into the MARC communications format .The document defines the principles fo rinclusion of nonroman alphabet charactersets in the MARC communications forma tand the procedural changes needed to allow implementation of the principles. This technique was agreed upon at the MARBI Committee meeting on February 2, 1981.

Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography

THE PRESENT ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March 1974. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modern dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama. including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. This year's list covers 1976 and further 1975 items, plus a sprinkling of missed 1974 items. The MLA International Bibliography for 1974 supplements the previous list even more, especially with regard to articles in non-literary periodicals and material in non-Roman alphabets. The MLA volumes for 1975 should come out in late summer or early fall.

Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography

THE PRESENT ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March 1974. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modern dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. This year's list covers 1975 and further 1974 items, plus a sprinkling of missed 1973 items. The MLA International Bibliography for 1973 supplements the previous list even more, especially with regard to articles in nonliterary periodicals and material in non-Roman alphabets. The MLA volumes for 1974 should come out this summer.

Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography

THE PRESENT ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March 1974. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modern dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. This year's list covers not only 1974 and further 1973 publications, but also a selection of missed 1972 items. The M LA International Bibliography for 1972 supplements the previous list even more, especially with regard to articles in non-literary periodicals and material in non-Roman alphabets. The MLA volumes for 1973 should come out early this summer

Symposium on the uses of the computer in literary research: A conference report

This symposium held at Cambridge on 23-26 March 1970, was the first of its kind in the United Kingdom. Dr. Roy A. Wisbey and the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre at Cambridge University acted as hosts to the sixty-two participants from nine countries, who were fairly evenly divided between literary scholars with experience of computer applications and computer specialists with experience of literary work. Most of the questions considered in the papers given at the symposium come under the following headings: computers and lexicography: experiences with information retrieval and concordance production; problems of data input and output; programming languages; applications in non-European languages; vocabulary studies; stylistic analysis; poetry generation; and textual collation and editing. From the material produced, it was possible to see the current stages of progress achieved so far in all these areas of research. Some researchers were concentrating on the technical problems involved in using computers in literary studies, such as the input and output of data and programming languages suited to literary data processing. The graphical output of data on an sc4020, where the information is displayed on a cathode ray tube and recorded on microfilm or photo-recording paper, was described by Dr. R. F. Churchhouse and Miss S. M. Petty of the Atlas Computer Laboratory. The sc4020 can be used in a high speed plotter mode, with the normal character set available on a line printer, and concordances produced using the Laboratory's COCOA program have been recorded on microfilm using this mode. It is now possible to produce output in Greek characters, including diacritical marks, and work is in progress on reproducing Arabic characters as well. When all the character shapes are complete, the sc4020 will be used for the output of concordances in other non-Roman alphabets. Theoretically, it is possible to program the sc4020 to produce any alphabet or collection of symbols, and the availability of non-Roman alphabets should be a great encouragement to scholars requiring these facilities. A project to measure the extent to which it is possible to automate the routine checking and maintenance of the British Museum Catalogue was outlined by Miss Eveline Wilson of the Documentation Processing Centre, Manchester. Syntax analysis techniques using the syntax improving device (SID) developed at the Royal Radar Establishment have been used to analyze the data in the B.M. Catalogue. Entries in the catalogue have complex data structures, devised before machine processing was developed, and designed by men of high intelligence and on the assumption that

Conversion of Bibliographic Information to Machine Readable Form Using On-Line Computer Terminals

A description of the first six months of a project to convert to machine readable form the entire shelf list of the Libraries of the State University of New York at Buffalo. IBM DATATEXT, the on-line computer service which was used for the conversion, provided an upper- and lower-case typewriter which transmitted data to disk storage of a digital computer. Output was a magnetic tape containing bibliographic information tagged in a modified MARC I format. Typists performed all tagging at the console. All information except diacriticals and non-Roman alphabets was converted. Direct costs for the first six months were $.55 per title.