Our research examines text knowledge: the knowledge encoded in text and the knowledge about a text. We approach text knowledge from different perspectives, describing the theories and techniques that have been applied to extracting, representing and deploying this knowledge, and propose some novel techniques that may enhance the understanding of text knowledge. These techniques include the concept of virtual corpus hierarchies, hybrid symbolic and connectionist representation and reasoning, text analysis and self-organising corpora. We present these techniques in a framework that embraces the different facets of text knowledge as a whole, be it corpus organisation and text identification, text analysis, or knowledge representation and reasoning. This framework comprises three phases, that of organisation, analysis and evaluation of text, where a single text might be a complete work, a technical term, or even a single letter. The techniques proposed are demonstrated by implementations of computer systems and some experiments based on these implementations: the Quirk Experiments. Through these experiments we show how the highly interconnected nature of text knowledge can be reduced or abstracted for specific purposes, from a range of techniques based on explicit symbolic representations and self-organising connectionist schemes.

Whilst in recent years a number of historians and sociologists have analysed sports as social, cultural and economic processes, relatively few have considered the cultural and ideological implications of sport as an object of representation. This thesis aims to intervene in such debates by considering the emergence and development of the discourse of cricket, a sport intimately associated with ideas of "Englishness" and empire, and one with an unparalleled "Literary" tradition. In order to account for the socially productive function of forms of literary discourse in defining the hegemonic meaning of the cricket field, three interconnected discursive processes are identified: Literaturisation, Canonisation and Aestheticisation. These processes are related to broader manifestations of English cultural nationalism such as the emergence of English Studies in the late nineteenth century. The main body of the thesis is structured around the analysis of a series of historical moments (such as The Great War and the 1926 General Strike), "discursive events" (for instance, the "Bodyline" Series of 1932-33), and key writers and texts. As well as utilising its main trinity of theoretical concepts, the analysis identifies patterns of repetition and regularity within the changing patterns of cricket discourse. These analyses reveal that the discursive meaning of cricket as a symbol of nation and empire was a matter of constant renegotiation, and was consistently produced and reproduced as a response to perceptions of socio-economic, political and cultural crisis. Because cricket discourse was an agent of both imperial hegemony and anti-colonial counter-hegemony, the analysis also considers its dissemination and cultural work within the colonial and postcolonial dispensations. Through a reading of C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary, a theorisation of the relationship between the discursive and the performative emerges as a means of accounting for the counter-hegemonic appropriation and re-articulation of cricket into an instrument of postcolonial subjectivity and agency.

Intercultural contacts that allowed for cross-cultural fertilization were made possible through translation. Translation, in the main, has been understood as an activity that requires knowing the source and target languages to achieve the same informational and emotive effects of the source language in the target one. Yet, the search for equivalence led translators to realize that linguistic terms do not appear in isolation; they are part and parcel of a culture. Fairclough's stipulation, from a critical discourse analysis point of view, that language as discourse is invested with ideologies that organize socially shared attitudes, engages language in a complex relationship with social cognition, power and culture. The characterization of language as such leads to the production of a master discourse through which identity, similarity and difference are identified. Within the context of globalization, intercultural translation, particularly between cultures that are unequal politically and economically, adheres to a master discourse of translation and representation through which the other is received, accepted and/ or refused then reproduced. Consequently, source texts and people are transformed into signs familiar to the translating community constructing as such domestic identities of foreign cultures. Drawing on translation from Arabic, and in light of critical discourse analysis approaches, the translation of culture and the culture of translation, the research considers the case of Nawal El-Saadawi. The aim is to explore and examine how the constraints and disciplinary demands of the master discourse of translation and representation affect the translation traffic from Arabic into English. In a rapidly globalizing world, the ethics of translation postulate that translation should create a readership that is open to cultural differences for a true globalization of cultures, and improve cultural relations rather than being a tool for reinforcing and diffusing existing representationsa nd images of one culture about the other

One of the outstanding scholars of the field of Moroccan travel literature was Muh?ammad b. Muh?ammad al-T?ayyib b. Muh?ammad b. Musa b. Muh?ammad al-Sharqi al-Sumayli, al-Fasi al-Madani. Born in the city of Fez in 1110/1698. He studied with some of the most known scholars of Morocco at that time including Abu al-cAbbas Ah?mad al-Misnawi, Abu cAbdullah Muh?ammad al-Misnawi, Abu al-cAbbas Ah?mad al-Fasi and Abu T?ahir Muhammad al-Kurani. Having acquired his early education in his home country he emigrated eastward to Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and finally to Medinah where he died in 1170/1756 after living and teaching there for many years. It is not surprising then that this great scholar left behind him a treasure of works in a variety of fields; indeed we find Ibn al-T?ayyib wrote many works, including four in jurisprudence, three in h?adith and sixteen in grammar and in linguistics. Despite this however many of his academic contributions remain in manuscript form and therefore are inaccessible to the greater majority. One such work is “Rih?lah il a al-H?ijaz,” which is particularly important to the field of travel literature as it represents a major contribution. This is because Ibn al-T?ayyib came relatively late, historically, compared to other travel writers. In addition, it contains many minute details, which the author took care to record during his journey from place to place. It also contains accounts of everything he saw and his comments regarding the social, economic and political conditions of the countries he visited, as well as comments about the scholars whom he was able to meet. This work is important also because it is considered the most important reference for the author’s life, culture and is an important literary reference in terms of the poetry and prose, classical and modern, eastern and western, that it contains. In addition it accounts for both literary and religious scholars, the linguistic derivations of geographical names and draws attention to the mistakes of those who wrote about them before him. Bearing in mind the great significance of this work from a variety of aspects this thesis involves the complete revision, editing, annotation and authentication of the manuscript including the correction of missing characters and providing available information and biographical notes on the text.

This study is concerned with the relationship between the European Union(EU) and the Maghreb countries from its inception up to now. It sets out to examine the effects that the Union policy, in its different phases and proper instruments, appears to have had on the Maghreb countries. The claim of the thesis is that the outcome of this policy, in relation to its goals in the various areas during earlier phases, has been less than satisfactory. It further argues that if the present phase is not accompanied by a much more assertive presence of, and active role from, the EU in this region, it is most likely to prove highly costly to the Maghreb countries and may amount as a result to an additional disappointing attempt. To develop and illustrate these arguments, the study is divided into three parts. The first part, consisting of two chapters, surveys the major theoretical debate on North-South relations and attempts a definition of the nature and characteristic features of the Euro-Maghreb relationship along with an examination of certain determinant factors in its evolutionary process. The second part, composed of two chapters, takes stock of, and assesses the comparative achievements/shortcomings of former phases of the EU policy towards the Maghreb countries both initially in the area of trade, and later with the addition of issues of economic aid and migrant labour. The third part, made up of two chapters, considers the EU's present partnership approach that is essentially a European response to the implications arising from growing socio-economic dislocation and political instability in the Maghreb region. On the one hand, it reviews the sources of that potential instability and, on the other hand, attempts an evaluation of the partnership arrangements in their immediate effect and future prospects. Finally, a number of implications for a better approach to the future development of the relationship between both sides emerge from the summary and suggestions of the concluding chapter.

As Philip L. Simpson notes, humankind has an ‘ongoing ... fascination with tales of gruesome murders and evil villains’ (15). Popular culture abounds with depictions of the mad and the bad; and perhaps no single disorder holds as much morbid appeal as psychopathy, the baffling condition which combines what Hervey M. Cleckley terms a ‘mask of sanity’, with a seeming lack of the qualities usually deemed to constitute humanity. My thesis focuses on how authors have sought to explain, interpret and understand the psychopathic individual, and explores how literary techniques have manipulated readers’ responses to the moral questions posed by psychopathic characters. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the present day, authors have increasingly used empathetic narrative techniques to encourage readers to identify with and accept the villains whose stories they so voraciously consume. I track the transitions in narrative style, structure and form which take us from depictions of the psychopath as fiendish ‘other’, for example Rigaud in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, to modern portrayals of the psychopathic murderer as hero, as seen in Jeff Lindsay’s series of Dexter novels. I consider what the reader gains from reading such material and how we as readers negotiate the paradox of empathising with characters who are themselves incapable of empathy. I also explore whether cultural fascination with the psychopath is based on a desire to understand the workings of the psychopathic mind, a perverse delight in our fear of the aberrant ‘other’, or whether it reveals something altogether darker and more disturbing about ourselves.

The amount of biomedical literature available is increasing at an exponential rate and is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. Text-mining methods can potentially mitigate this problem, through the systematic and large-scale extraction of structured information from inherently unstructured biomedical text. This thesis reports the development of four text-mining systems that, by building on each other, has enabled the extraction of information about a large number of published statements in the biomedical literature. The first system, LINNAEUS, enables highly accurate detection ('recognition') and identification ('normalization') of species names in biomedical articles. Building on LINNAEUS, we implemented a range of improvements in the GNAT system, enabling high-throughput gene/protein detection and identification. Using gene/protein identification from GNAT, we developed the Gene Expression Text Miner (GETM), which extracts information about gene expression statements. Finally, building on GETM as a pilot project, we constructed the BioContext integrated event extraction system, which was used to extract information about over 11 million distinct biomolecular processes in 10.9 million abstracts and 230,000 full-text articles. The ability to detect negated statements in the BioContext system enables the preliminary analysis of potential contradictions in the biomedical literature. All tools (LINNAEUS, GNAT, GETM, and BioContext) are available under open-source software licenses, and LINNAEUS and GNAT are available as online web-services. All extracted data (36 million BioContext statements, 720,000 GETM statements, 72,000 contradictions, 37 million mentions of species names, 80 million mentions of gene names, and 57 million mentions of anatomical location names) is available for bulk download. In addition, the data extracted by GETM and BioContext is also available to biologists through easy-to-use search interfaces.

No description available.

No description available.

In a project called "A Library of a Billion Words" we needed an implementation of the CTS protocol that is capable of handling a text collection containing at least 1 billion words. Because the existing solutions did not work for this scale or were still in development I started an implementation of the CTS protocol using methods that MySQL provides. Last year we published a paper that introduced a prototype with the core functionalities without being compliant with the specifications of CTS (Tiepmar et al., 2013). The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate the MySQL based implementa-tion now that it is fulfilling the specifications version 5.0 rc.1 and mark it as finished and ready to use. Fur-ther information, online instances of CTS for all de-scribed datasets and binaries can be accessed via the projects website1. Reference Tiepmar J, Teichmann C, Heyer G, Berti M and Crane G. 2013. A new Implementation for Canonical Text Services. in Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH).