Sharif Digital Repository

In qualitative content analysis research with the aim of identifying areas of language impairmenthigh-functioning Persian-speaking autistic children, ten subjects were observed during fifteen training sessions which were the cognitive block of a three-block training program. Each session lasted 90 minutes and was video recorded. Prior to this, focus group interviews with specialists and semi-structured interviews with mothers and parallel to that focus group interviews with mothers were handled all of which were audio recorded. After two levels of initial and second coding, a final list of areas of impairment in the language of high-functioning Persian-speaking autistic children, that... 

With the rapid development in information-communication technologies a huge amount of electronic documents has been produced and increase everyday in the world wide web. According to this wide information environment, summarization is critical for the users who digest this electronic big data. This research proposes two graph-based abstractive models for summarizing the Persian texts. A good summary should cover the overall context and the important subjects, and should be properly readable and coherent as well. Some permanent challenges in automatic text summarizations intended to increase the readability of output text, as well as covering all the main topics, and minimize the redundancy.... 

This thesis was an attempt to find the effect of having multi-domain conceptual network on metaphorical creativity. The purpose of this research was to answer the following question: By extending and expanding the mental conceptual network, could one increase their potential creativity; In other words, is expansion of the mental conceptual network one of the parameters of creativity or not.To answer this question, a questionnaire and a test were developped. Through the questionnaire, we divided the sample group into the test and control groups. And the test indicated how creative each individual is.There were three different ways the sample group was divided. The criteria for dividing the... 

One of the ways for semantic modelling of natural languages is to use the distributed representations of words. Formerly in order to produce the distributed representations of words several methods like LSA, LDA and other techniques taken from information retrieval were applied. The main idea presented by these methods is that the whole document consists of one central topic that has become hidden by the words it is made of. These models assign one general meaning to the whole document and do not regard words as semantically independent. However, each of the words of a document have specific senses that these models are not able to reflect. On the other hand efforts done in the field of... 

A semantic role labeler is a software that takes sentences as inputs and identifies the words or groups which have semantic roles such as Agent, Theme, Source, Instrument etc. The correct identification of semantic rols using computers can improve the quality of many natural language processing tasks such as information extraction, question and answering, text summarization and machine translation.Therefore a considerable amount of research has been carried out on this topic. Semantic role labelers normally use features extracted from the syntactic structure of the input sentences. That is why the syntactic representation used has a prominent role in the system's outcome. The research... 

Morphological analysis of words plays a fundamental role in natural language processing applications such as spell checker, POS-tagging and machine translation. Among different dialects belonging to Kurdish, Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji), Central Kurdish (Sorani) and Southern Kurdish are the closest ones to each other. The central dialect of Kurdish is the second official language in Iraq and a large volume of text content is producing daily in this dialect. In this research, designing and implementation of a two-level morphological analyzer for the central Kurdish dialect is introduced. This analyzer is designed using an open source toolkit named HFST, which is a finite state transducer... 

The present study, examined native English speakers and nonnative English learners in terms of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP), more specifically intercultural variations in performing the two speech acts of compliments and compliment responses. The study employed both qualitative and quantitative analysis with regard to the research questions. First, the data was collected from 50 Americans and 50 Iranians through compliment and compliment response Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs). Then, patterns of strategies from natives and nonnatives productions, were extracted. Regarding compliments, 8 strategies were found including Appreciation or Admiration followed by Explicitness, Acknowledgement... 

According to Yook and Lindemann (2012), attitudes play a significant role in motivation and in the quality and quantity of acquiring a specific language. Moreover, the worldwide spread of English demands a more rigorous focus being directed toward the attitudes of users of English in the group which Kachru (1997) has referred to as the Expanding Circle. Yet, scant attention has been devoted to the issue of World Englishes in Iran. In addition, a dearth of large-scale studies on attitudes toward different varieties of Englishes in Iran has led to deficient theoretical and methodological bases. To niche this gap, the current study tried to shed light on some dark sides of this subject by... 

This study aims at classifying outputs of Reduplication (Total and Partial Reduplication) in Persian, in order to demonstrate the types and processes which lead to the lexicalization of some reduplicated forms and assign them lexical position in lexicography as individual lexical entries. There are distinct phonological, morphological and semantic evidences behind the lexicalization of some types of reduplicated items in Persian. Approximately about 269 totally reduplicated words and 293 partially reduplicated words have been collected and analyzed according to the said morphological, phonological and semantic considerations. Partial and Total Reduplication process is one of the productive... 

This study attempts to describe and analyze Persian speakers’ linguistic knowledge of different types of causative and inchoative constructions within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). In order to do so, different studies on Persian causative alternations within theories other than LFG as well as causative alternations in other languages within LFG are reviewed. Next, different types of causative constructions are categorized conceptually and structurally after they are extracted from Bijankhan corpus (2005). Then they are analyzed syntactically and semantically. In this regard, we represent syntactic and semantic structures based on LFG as a monostratal theory. After that,... 

Prepositions are considered as frequent linguistic units whose role in computational linguistics cannot be neglected. These units are often thought to have no lexical meaning; moreover, it is a widely held belief that prepositions are solely used for sentence cohesion. On the other hand, in some cases the substitution of one particular preposition with another one would change the meaning of sentences.
The main question which is concerned in this thesis is “Whether prepositions should be regarded as meaningful units or semantically empty units?” In order to achieve this goal, the present study is conducted as a library research and a field research. In the library research, 1000... 

Compound verbs (CVs) and its components, have been widely discussed in previous linguistics' researches as one of the most important and fundamental constructions of Persian language. Nevertheless most of the arguments and assumptions in those researches align with each other and studying CVs from another aspect with a different viewpoint has not been considered very much in order to solve nodes and issues in this area. We have endeavored in this thesis to review and criticize the portrayed definitions of the CVs, reconsider this construction and the syntactical and semantical roles of verbal and non-verbal elements in this combination from another point of view, and revise the previous... 

Mental models are a reflection of the individuals’ cognitive structure. In fact, these models are the conceptual frameworks that people form based on their experiences and knowledge. These models gives the individuals the ability to predict the results of an action and interpret their surroundings. In this cognitive-linguistic study, mental models are defined as concepts and the relationships between them in a particular context. Considering this definition of mental models, we could extract the mental models of two American presidents of opposing parties, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, from their speech transcriptions during their presidential periods and classify their concepts in to... 

Disambiguating concepts in language is one of the most challenging tasks in the field of natural language processing and computational linguistics. A sort of these ambiguities can be found in metaphorical and metonymic concepts. In the present study, we try to introduce the structure of the detecting and disambiguating system of metaphor and metonymy. Detection step is based on semantic valency of the verbs occurring within the subject and object positions and the disambiguation step on the key topical concepts. The data of the detection step involves semantic valency of the seven metaphorically and metonymically frequent verbs. First of all, the data were collected by extracting the... 

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is aimed at extracting meaning from natural spoken language. Meaning extraction ranges from "extracting specific phrases" to "extracting users' intentions from their speech" and goes as far as "extracting the entities and details of their intentions". Extracting the exact intended meaning of the user is a sophisticated process. In this research, considering the lack of standard data in Persian, an SLU system for this language has been implemented using Markov Logic Networks (MLNs), in order to reduce the need for extra datasets. MLNs combine the explanatory power and orderliness of First-Order Logic with the uncertainty of probabilities. Therefore, these... 

One of the most important methods of controlling discharge in water industry which is widely used in irrigation, water distribution, waste-water engineering, drainage, flood control and other water related projects, is side weir. The hydraulic behavior of flow over side weir is spatially varied flow with decreasing discharge. Various investigators have related the weir discharge coefficient as a function of main channel upstream Froude number and the fraction of weir height to upstream depth . Performance of sharp crested side weirs with extended length (as labyrinth side weir with asymmetric geometry) has been studied in this thesis. The variables for this study are height of weir ,...