Online reviews regarding different products or services have become the main source to determine public opinions. Consequently, manufacturers and sellers are extremely concerned with customer reviews as these have a direct impact on their businesses. Unfortunately, to gain profit or fame, spam reviews are written to promote or demote targeted products or services. This practice is known as review spamming. In recent years, Spam Review Detection problem (SRD) has gained much attention from researchers, but still there is a need to identify review spammers who often work collaboratively to promote or demote targeted products. It can severely harm the review system. This work presents the Spammer Group Detection (SGD) method which identifies suspicious spammer groups based on the similarity of all reviewer’s activities considering their review time and review ratings. After removing these identified spammer groups and spam reviews, the resulting non-spam reviews are displayed using diversification technique. For the diversification, this study proposed Diversified Set of Reviews (DSR) method which selects diversified set of top-k reviews having positive, negative, and neutral reviews/feedback covering all possible product features. Experimental evaluations are conducted on Roman Urdu and English real-world review datasets. The results show that the proposed methods outperformed the existing approaches when compared in terms of accuracy.

Lately, there has been a growing interest in media. As a result, many trends are found from both the academic and industrial points of view. News channels, for example, play an important role in transmitting news about political situations, military events and other issues to people all over the world. The language used in news reports or even in their headlines is very influential in attaining the communicative intent of such news reports. This language is characterized by various linguistic features. One aspect of those features is the pragmatic one. This latter issue has not been given its due attention in research study. Precisely, the use of speech acts as a basic component of pragmatics has not been sufficiently tackled in research work in this regard. Thus, the present study attempts to fill this gap and investigate the types of speech acts employed in CNN and BBC headlines that represent the Syrian conflict. Fifty-six headlines are selected from each of these news channels - 26 from CNN and 30 from BBC. This study purports that headlines can be loaded with the encoded pragmatic meanings which makes this study worth conducting to reveal those kinds of meanings. The selected period ranges from September 2015 to May 2016.The investigation performed by this study shows that scrutinizing the speech acts employed in the headlines in news channels can be a good way to understand the intended meaning set by writers. It is found out that assertive speech acts are the most frequent speech acts used in the headlines of CNN and BBC news channels. The results also indicate that the headlines of CNN news channel show a preponderance use of commissives whereas the headlines of BBC news channel show an eminent employment of expressives.

This study sets out to investigate  structural metaphors in The Glorious Qur’an within the framework of  conceptual metaphor theory. It represents  part of our experience from a cognitive semantic perspective. Structural metaphors are used to structure and understand the abstract concepts in terms of more clear and delineated ones. Structural metaphors  perform an important function when they are used in The Glorious Qur'an, in that It is characterized by Its uniqueness, style and its aesthetic and rhetoric structures. Structural  metaphors play an essential role in opening  new horizons for readers to understand the deeper meanings of the Qura'nic  Ayas  which are used metaphorically in order to give a specific significance whether intellectual, psychological or aesthetic. This study comes to investigate structural metaphors in The Glorious Qur'an.  It is hypothesized that structural  metaphors are commonly used in The Glorious Qur'an. Structural  metaphors are used in The Glorious Qur'an to facilitate the understanding of abstract concepts in terms of concrete ones. It is also hypnotized that the use of structural  metaphors in The Glorious Qur'an is meant to meet specific rhetorical meanings.         To carry out the present study,  nine Ayas from The Glorious Qur'an are studied with the analysis of three different translations to check to what extent these translations give equivalent translations to structural metaphors. These translations are Pickthall (1930), Ali (1987) and Al-Hilali and Khan (1996). The most important conclusions of this  study are: 1)structural metaphors have a decisive role in determining the precise meaning of the Qur'anic texts and 2) among the semantic significances employed by these metaphors, intellectual significances are used  abundantly.

Lately, pragmatics has attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers. It has been integrated into many fields of study that have contributed to the study of language. A debate is a special form of an argumentative dialogue in which two or more parties take part in attacking and defending certain claims through reasoned discourse. This study has set itself to pragmatically analyze and evaluate selected arguments of religious debates. Islamic-Christian debates are specifically chosen as data for the current study because they have not received due attention in language studies. This study is essentially concerned with investigating the logical pragmatics in the context of Deedat-Swaggart‟s debate. Consequently, the study aims at: identifying the most frequently utilized logical pragmatics strategies; showing whether the pragmatic criteria are frequently kept to or violated. To fulfill the aims, it is hypothesized that debaters utilize certain logical pragmatics strategies (grounds, warrants, claims, backings, qualifiers, and rebuttals, certain types of reasoning, and argumentation schemes), the pragmatic criteria are frequently violated. The study employs a mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) to analyze the data and to verify or reject the hypotheses. The results of the study reveal that the most frequent pragmatic strategies utilized by Deedat are: grounds, deductive reasoning, argument from expert opinion. Swaggart, on the other hand, highly employs: grounds, presumptive reasoning, argument from expert opinion. The results have also shown that Deedat‟s chains of arguments are stronger and more persuasive than Swaggart‟s in terms of satisfying the logical criteria of argument evaluation.

There has been an increasing interest in hate speech due to its impact on both individuals and societies. The term 'hate speech' covers expressions in any form deemed humiliating to any race, religion, ethnic or national group. Hate speech is connected to the freedom of expression , advocacy of hatred and incitement of violence. Thus, it has to be understood in the different contexts in which it occurs. The present study deals with racial hate speech. The main aim of this study is to identify the speech acts employed in articles published in a Rwandan newspaper called Kangura. In order to carry out a pragmatic analysis of racial hate speech, seven extracts have been chosen. The main conclusions arrived at is that directives are the most common ones used in the dissemination of racial hate speech and indirect speech acts outnumber the direct ones.