Sharif Digital Repository

Prepositions are considered as frequent linguistic units, whose role in computational linguistics cannot be neglected. These units are often thought to have functional meaning. On the other hand, in some cases, the substitution of one particular preposition with another onewould changethe meaning ofa sentence. This paper argues that prepositions are not meaningless units, which are only used for the purpose of sentence cohesion. The central goal of the research is to show that prepositions are meaning distinguishing elements. In order to achieve this goal, five Persian prepositions are examined in a Persian text corpus. Firstly, 1000 sentences consisting of these prepositions are extracted... 

Nowadays, security has become an important issue for organizations especially in e-commerce applications. The spreading of networks and increasing of their complexity has complicated the task of security analysis, therefore automatic approaches have received more attention recently. This paper proposes a model-based approach to analyze the overall security of a network, based on the interaction of hosts within the network. A simple language is introduced far modeling securityrelated behaviours of networks and systems. Using the language, a case study is described and its formal model and security properties are presented. © 2004 IEEE  

Treebanks are not large enough to reliably model precise lexical phenomena. This deficiency provokes attachment errors in the parsers trained on such data. We propose in this paper to compute lexical affinities, on large corpora, for specific lexico-syntactic configurations that are hard to disambiguate and introduce the new information in a parser. Experiments on the French Treebank showed a relative decrease of the error rate of 7.1% Labeled Accuracy Score yielding the best parsing results on this treebank  

This study aims at examining the effect of Robot Assisted language learning (RALL) on the anxiety level and attitude in the English language learning classroom. Forty-six female students who were beginners at the age of 12 participated in this study and were randomly assigned into two groups of RALL (30 students) and non-RALL (16 students). The treatment was given by a teacher accompanied by a humanoid robot assistant for the RALL group. Two questionnaires of anxiety [15] and attitude [19] were utilized to measure the students' anxiety and attitude. The results of descriptive and t-tests indicated that there was lower anxiety and positive attitude towards English learning in the RALL group... 

Fuzzy logic has proved to be a powerful tool to represent imprecise and irregular patterns. This paper presents a novel fuzzy approach for recognizing online Persian (Farsi) handwriting which is also useful for multi-writer environments. In this approach, the representation of handwriting parameters is accomplished by fuzzy linguistic modeling. The representative features are selected to describe the shape of tokens. Fuzzy linguistic terms provide robustness against handwriting variations. The purposed method was run on a database of Persian isolated handwritten characters and achieved a relatively high recognition rate. © 2005 IEEE  

This paper presents a novel method for answering complex temporal ordering questions in the context of an event and query-based text summarization. This task is accomplished by precisely mapping the problem of "query-based summarization of temporal ordering questions" in the field of Natural Language Processing to "verifying a finite state model against a temporal formula" in the realm of Model Checking. This mapping requires specific definitions, structures, and procedures. The output of this new approach is promisingly a readable and informative summary satisfying the user's needs  

This study aimed to examine the effect of robot assisted language learning (RALL) on the anxiety level and attitude in English vocabulary acquisition amongst Iranian EFL junior high school students. Forty-six female students, who were beginners at the age of 12, participated in this study and were randomly assigned into two groups of RALL (30 students) and non-RALL (16 students). The textbook, the materials, as well as the teacher were the same in the two groups. However in the RALL group, the treatment was given by a teacher accompanied by a humanoid robot assistant. Two questionnaires of anxiety and attitude were utilized to measure the students’ anxiety and attitude (Horwitz et al. 1986;... 

A Santha-Vazirani (SV) source is a sequence of random bits where the conditional distribution of each bit, given the previous bits, can be partially controlled by an adversary. Santha and Vazirani show that deterministic randomness extraction from these sources is impossible. In this paper, we study the generalization of SV sources for nonbinary sequences. We show that unlike the binary case, deterministic randomness extraction in the generalized case is sometimes possible. We present a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for the possibility of deterministic randomness extraction. These two conditions coincide in “non-degenerate” cases. Next, we turn to a distributed setting. In... 

In this paper we have reviewed Nevisa Persian speech recognition engine. Nevisa is an HMM-based, large vocabulary speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. Like most successful recognition systems, MFCC with some modification has been used as speech signal features. It also utilizes a VAD based on signal energy and zero-crossing rate. Maximum likelihood estimation criterion the core of which are the classical segmental k-means and Baum-Welsh algorithms is used for training the acoustic models. The system is based on phoneme modeling and utilizes synchronous beam search based on lexicon tree for decoding the acoustic utterances. Language modeling for Persian has been... 

One of the roles of a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model in Continuous Speech Recognition (CSR) systems is to find the best sentence hypothesis by ranking all n-best sentences according to the grammar. This paper describes a robust parsing algorithm for Spoken Language Recognition (SLR) which utilizes a technique that improves the efficiency of parsing. This technique integrates grammatical and statistical approaches, and by using a best-first parsing strategy improves the accuracy of recognition. Preliminary experimental results using a Persian continuous speech recognition system show effective improvements in accuracy with little change in recognition time. The word error rate was... 

The world is changing very fast, and so are the ways of communication and computation. This article is about a new communication and information technology based on the principles of the quantum physics. At first we discuss about some fundamental paradigms of Quantum Computers World, and then introducing the basis of quantum computation: "QBit". Afterthat we will explain some magic properties of this atomic QBit including Quantum Measurement, Superposition, Entanglement, etc. Then we introduce Quantum Gates the basic modules of the next generation computers. Their relation with the ordinary logical gates and the properties of some of the most useful quantum gates. And finally, we will have a... 

Voice activity detection is an important step in some speech processing systems, such as speech recognition, speech enhancement, noise estimation, speech compression ... etc. In this paper a new voice activity detection algorithm based on wavelet transform is proposed. In this algorithm we use the energy in each sub band, and by two methods we extract feature vector from these values. Experimental results demonstrate advantage over different VAD methods. ©2008 IEEE  

Recent studies in the field of text-steganography shows a promising future for linguistic driven stegosystems. One of the most common techniques in this field is known as lexical substitution which provides the requirements for security and payload capacity. However, the existing lexical substitution schemes need an enormous amount of shared data between sender and receiver which acts as the stego key. In this paper, we propose a novel encoding method to overcome this problem. Our proposed approach preserves the good properties of lexical substitution schemes while it provides short length stego keys and significant robustness against active adversary attacks. We demonstrate high efficiency...