In this article, I examine the representation of environmental issues in Amazigh narratives. I focus on texts that address the relationships between humans, society, the environment, and colonial greed. Employing ecocritical theory, I offer an interpretation of Amazigh oral traditions and storytelling, highlighting the vital role that autochthonous peoples play in environmental stewardship and sustainable development through their traditional practices. The interdisciplinary approach I adopt to analyse the material draws on ecocriticism—a literary and ethical approach to the environment—as well as elements of cultural and folklore studies. After providing an overview of the environmental challenges faced by Western societies in the 19th century and the ways in which they were conceptualised, I introduce the perspectives found in selected examples of Amazigh oral literature that engage with environmental concerns arising from industrialisation, technicism, and colonialism. My analysis of Amazigh tales involving animals and natural elements is enriched by comparisons with animals in the broader Maghrebi tradition, as well as parallels with Dogon myths and narratives from Sahelian-Sudanese ethnic groups. These comparisons help to deepen our understanding of Amazigh cosmologies and verbal systems.
Peres Akello Obondo, Juliet Akinyi Jagero, Naomi Nzilani Musembi
Ili pawepo na mahusiano mema kati ya binadamu, lazima pawepo na utu. Utu, hasa huhusishwa na binadamu. Hali kadhalika, huhusisha wema wowote unaomtendea mtu. Waandishi mbalimbali wa fasihi ya Kiswahili wamedhihirisha utu katika utunzi wao. Mtu anapopokea tendo la utu, huathirika kwa namna mbalimbali. Makala haya yanachunguza athari ya upokezi wa matendo ya utu kwa binadamu. Lengo kuu la makala ni kueleza binadamu anavyoathirika kwa njia mbalimbali kutokana na utu wa viumbe wa kiuhalisiajabu. Viumbe wa kiuhalisiajabu kama wanavyoitwa ni viumbe wenye sifa za kiajabuajabu. Ni viumbe tofauti na binadamu halisi na wenye nguvu fulani. Kutokana na nguvu hizo, huweza kufanya matendo mbalimbali. Makala iliongozwa na nadharia ya kiuhalisiajabu kama inavyofafanuliwa na Zamora na Wendy (1995). Muundo wa kimaelezo ulitumika huku eneo la utafiti likiwa fasihi ya Kiswahili, utanzu wa Riwaya. Sampuli ya kimakusudi ilitumika kuteua riwaya tatu za Said A. Mohamed hususan: Babu Alipofufuka (2001), Dunia Yao (2006) na Nyuso za Mwanamke (2010). Data ilikusanywa kutokana na kusoma riwaya hizo tatu zilizoteuliwa na kudondoa sehemu zilizolingana na malengo ya utafiti. Data ilidondolewa, ikanukuliwa, ikapangwa kisha kuchanganuliwa. Matokeo yalionyesha kuwa viumbe wa kiuhalisiajabu walidhihirisha utu kwa binadamu kwa namna mbalimbali na athari yake ikabainika. Utafiti huu unatoa mchango kwa walimu na wataalamu wa fasihi katika taaluma ya fasihi simulizi.
Linear automata are automata with two reading heads starting from the two extremes of the input, are equivalent to 5' -> 3' Watson-Crick (WK) finite automata. The heads read the input in opposite directions and the computation finishes when the heads meet. These automata accept the class LIN of linear languages. The deterministic counterpart of these models, on the one hand, is less expressive, as only a proper subset of LIN, the class 2detLIN is accepted; and on the other hand, they are also equivalent in the sense of the class of the accepted languages. Now, based on these automata models, we characterize the class of 2detLIN languages with a Myhill-Nerode type of equivalence classes. However, as these automata may do the computation of both the prefix and the suffix of the input, we use prefix-suffix pairs in our classes. Additionally, it is proven that finitely many classes in the characterization match with the 2detLIN languages, but we have some constraints on the used prefix-suffix pairs, i.e., the characterization should have the property to be complete and it must not have any crossing pairs.
Jan Baumeister, Arthur Correnson, Bernd Finkbeiner
et al.
Stream-based runtime monitors are safety assurance tools that check at runtime whether the system's behavior satisfies a formal specification. Specifications consist of stream equations, which relate input streams, containing sensor readings and other incoming information, to output streams, representing filtered and aggregated data. This paper presents a framework for the stream-based specification language RTLola. We introduce a new intermediate representation for stream-based languages, the StreamIR, which, like the specification language, operates on streams of unbounded length; while the stream equations are replaced by imperative programs. We developed a set of optimizations based on static analysis of the specification and have implemented an interpreter and a compiler for several target languages. In our evaluation, we measure the performance of several real-world case studies. The results show that using the StreamIR framework reduces the runtime significantly compared to the existing StreamIR interpreter. We evaluate the effect of the optimizations and show that significant performance gains are possible beyond the optimizations of the target language's compiler. While our current implementation is limited to RTLola, the StreamIR is designed to accommodate other stream-based languages, enabling their interpretation and compilation into all available target languages.
White liberal gestures of kindness such as interventions to alleviate poverty in black communities are often seen as altruistic initiatives with noble intentions. However, in recent years, these interventions have come under greater scrutiny as scholars question the “white savior mentality” that often frames and propels such initiatives. In fact, contemporary neo-liberal interventions bear resemblance with the colonial civilizing mission because of their preoccupation with fixing problems in “broken” black communities. This article draws on Steve Biko’s notion of black consciousness and some concepts from black feminist thought to explore how Rosie Motene’s autobiography, Reclaiming the Soil: A Black Girl’s Struggle to Find her African Self (henceforth Reclaiming the Soil) interrupts the hegemonic liberal narrative of white saviorism to insert an alternative narrative of black struggle for self-determination. The study has three objectives. Firstly, it investigates how the autobiography narrates Motene’s lived experiences as a black girl adopted by and growing up within a white family. Secondly, it explores how the autobiography narrates liberal white saviorism in the context of apartheid racism and discrimination. Thirdly, it examines how the contradictions of the apartheid system and the white savior narrative awaken feelings of resentment and ultimately black consciousness in the narrator. The study argues that Motene’s autobiography is a “black consciousness” text that highlights the inherent contradictions of being white and liberal in a society that systemically entrenches poverty and suffering for black people to serve white interests.
History of Africa, African languages and literature
Neris Özen, Wenjuan Mu, Esther D. van Asselt
et al.
The number of scientific articles published in the domain of food safety has consistently been increasing over the last few decades. It has therefore become unfeasible for food safety experts to read all relevant literature related to food safety and the occurrence of hazards in the food chain. However, it is important that food safety experts are aware of the newest findings and can access this information in an easy and concise way. In this study, an approach is presented to automate the extraction of chemical hazards from the scientific literature through large language models. The large language model was used out-of-the-box and applied on scientific abstracts; no extra training of the models or a large computing cluster was required. Three different styles of prompting the model were tested to assess which was the most optimal for the task at hand. The prompts were optimized with two validation foods (leafy greens and shellfish) and the final performance of the best prompt was evaluated using three test foods (dairy, maize and salmon). The specific wording of the prompt was found to have a considerable effect on the results. A prompt breaking the task down into smaller steps performed best overall. This prompt reached an average accuracy of 93% and contained many chemical contaminants already included in food monitoring programs, validating the successful retrieval of relevant hazards for the food safety domain. The results showcase how valuable large language models can be for the task of automatic information extraction from the scientific literature.
Backreference is a well-known practical extension of regular expressions and most modern programming languages, such as Java, Python, JavaScript and more, support regular expressions with backreferences (rewb) in their standard libraries for string processing. A difficulty of backreference is non-regularity: unlike some other extensions, backreference strictly enhances the expressive power of regular expressions and thus rewbs can describe non-regular (in fact, even non-context-free) languages. In this paper, we investigate the expressive power of rewbs by comparing rewbs to multiple context-free languages (MCFL) and parallel multiple context-free languages (PMCFL). First, we prove that the language class of rewbs is a proper subclass of unary-PMCFLs. The class of unary-PMCFLs coincides with that of EDT0L languages, and our result strictly improves the known upper bound of rewbs. Additionally, we show that, however, the language class of rewbs is not contained in that of MCFLs even when restricted to rewbs with only one capturing group and no captured references. Therefore, in general, the parallelism seems essential for rewbs. Backed by these results, we define a novel syntactic condition on rewbs that we call closed-star and observe that it provides an upper bound on the number of times a rewb references the same captured string. The closed-star condition allows dispensing with the parallelism: that is, we prove that the language class of closed-star rewbs falls inside the class of unary-MCFLs, which is equivalent to that of EDT0L systems of finite index. Furthermore, as additional evidence for the robustness of the condition, we show that the language class of closed-star rewbs also falls inside the class of nonerasing stack languages (NESL).
System programming languages are typically compiled in a linear pipeline process, which is a completely opaque and isolated to end-users. This limits the possibilities of performing meta-programming in the same language and environment, and the extensibility of the compiler itself by end-users. We propose a novel redefinition of the compilation process in terms of interpreting the program definition as a script. This evaluation is performed in an environment where the full compilation pipeline is implemented and exposed to the user via a meta-object protocol, which forms the basis for a meta-circular definition and implementation of the programming language itself. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by bootstrapping a self-compiling implementation of Sysmel, a static and dynamic typed Smalltalk and C++ inspired programming language.
In this paper, we focus on the problem of dynamically analysing concurrent software against high-level temporal specifications. Existing techniques for runtime monitoring against such specifications are primarily designed for sequential software and remain inadequate in the presence of concurrency -- violations may be observed only in intricate thread interleavings, requiring many re-runs of the underlying software. Towards this, we study the problem of predictive runtime monitoring, inspired by the analogous problem of predictive data race detection studied extensively recently. The predictive runtime monitoring question asks, given an execution $σ$, if it can be soundly reordered to expose violations of a specification. In this paper, we focus on specifications that are given in regular languages. Our notion of reorderings is trace equivalence, where an execution is considered a reordering of another if it can be obtained from the latter by successively commuting adjacent independent actions. We first show that the problem of predictive admits a super-linear lower bound of $O(n^α)$, where $n$ is the number of events in the execution, and $α$ is a parameter describing the degree of commutativity. As a result, predictive runtime monitoring even in this setting is unlikely to be efficiently solvable. Towards this, we identify a sub-class of regular languages, called pattern languages (and their extension generalized pattern languages). Pattern languages can naturally express specific ordering of some number of (labelled) events, and have been inspired by popular empirical hypotheses, the `small bug depth' hypothesis. More importantly, we show that for pattern (and generalized pattern) languages, the predictive monitoring problem can be solved using a constant-space streaming linear-time algorithm.
This is the proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Languages for Modelling Variability (MODEVAR 2024) which was held at Bern, Switzerland, February 06th 2024.
Stefan Strelcyn – a Polish scholar whose achievements were acknowledged by the Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1967 with a Haile Selassie Award for Ethiopian Studies – initiated African studies at the University of Warsaw. His main field of scholarly activity covered cataloguing manuscripts in various European library collections as well as studying traditional Ethiopian medicine and medicinal plants. However, during his field trip to Ethiopia in 1957/58 he recorded 26 tapes of various examples of Ethiopian orature in Ethiopic classical Ge’ez language and five other languages of Ethiopia: Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya, Gurage, and Harari. These recordings have been recently digitized. The first attempt to present their content, as well as a sample translation and literary analysis of four Amharic love poems recorded by Stefan Strelcyn, is undertaken in this article.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Philology. Linguistics
Sandy Ritchie, You-Chi Cheng, Mingqing Chen
et al.
Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide pathways to large vocabulary speech recognition for African languages: multilingual modeling and self-supervised learning. We gathered available open source data and collected data for 15 languages, and trained experimental models using these techniques. Our results show that pooling the small amounts of data available in multilingual end-to-end models, and pre-training on unsupervised data can help improve speech recognition quality for many African languages.
A description of language design choices that have profound effects on software quality, criticism of how ordinary OO languages address them, and explanation of the thinking behind Eiffel's corresponding mechanisms.
AI is widely thought to be poised to transform business, yet current perceptions of the scope of this transformation may be myopic. Recent progress in natural language processing involving transformer language models (TLMs) offers a potential avenue for AI-driven business and societal transformation that is beyond the scope of what most currently foresee. We review this recent progress as well as recent literature utilizing text mining in top IS journals to develop an outline for how future IS research can benefit from these new techniques. Our review of existing IS literature reveals that suboptimal text mining techniques are prevalent and that the more advanced TLMs could be applied to enhance and increase IS research involving text data, and to enable new IS research topics, thus creating more value for the research community. This is possible because these techniques make it easier to develop very powerful custom systems and their performance is superior to existing methods for a wide range of tasks and applications. Further, multilingual language models make possible higher quality text analytics for research in multiple languages. We also identify new avenues for IS research, like language user interfaces, that may offer even greater potential for future IS research.
ABSTRACT Learning challenges seem to persist in different ways in rural based universities. These challenges have led to increase in drop-out rates, as well as several menaces in the African society. Hence, this study explored the learning challenges among undergraduate students in rural universities in Africa. Relevant literatures which reported works that have previously been done on learning challenges experienced by undergraduates in rural African universities were reviewed. The methods adopted by the researchers were taken into cognizance. However, the research was limited to South Africa and Nigeria. The findings of the study show that undergraduates in the African rural universities experience common learning challenges which include: cognitive learning challenge, poor academic foundation, academic malpractice amongst academic staff and students, as well as lecturer-students’ relationship. These are caused by lack of facilities, students’ family socio-economic background, amongst others. The study therefore recommends that the necessary facilities and structures needed to facilitate teaching and learning practices should be provided. More lecturers should be recruited. Cordial student-lecturer relationships should be encouraged and promoted. In addition, policies that will ensure safety on campus, adoption and use of the most suitable language of instruction amongst others should be established. The study suggests the need for additional focus on the quality added to university education in developing African nations.