In this paper, we introduce the first SemEval task on Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Wordin-Context disambiguation (MCL-WiC). This task allows the largely under-investigated inherent ability of systems to discriminate between word senses within and across languages to be evaluated, dropping the requirement of a fixed sense inventory. Framed as a binary classification, our task is divided into two parts. In the multilingual sub-task, participating systems are required to determine whether two target words, each occurring in a different context within the same language, express the same meaning or not. Instead, in the crosslingual part, systems are asked to perform the task in a cross-lingual scenario, in which the two target words and their corresponding contexts are provided in two different languages. We illustrate our task, as well as the construction of our manually-created dataset including five languages, namely Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Russian, and the results of the participating systems. Datasets and results are available at: https://github.com/ SapienzaNLP/mcl-wic.
The aim of this paper is to present some recent examples of the variety spoken in the well-known Emirate of Dubai, the second largest of the seven Emirates that constitute the federation, located in the South Eastern shore of the Arabian Peninsula. The study is based on data gathered by the author between 2015 and 2016 during her recent fieldwork in the UAE1: the informants were young Emirati women aged between 20 and 30 years old. The purpose of the study is to contribute to the previous ones about Gulf Arabic, by presenting more recent examples and some morphological and syntactic features of the local variety in Dubai.
Qatari literature is still budding, as its diffusion can be credited to the birth of the press in the 1960s, and it is yet to have garnered the attention of Western scholars, especially if compared to the literature from Arabian Persian Gulf countries, such as Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia. This study aims at contributing to enrich the discourse on Qatari literature, by analysing the structure and contents of the short story The Newspaper Seller, published in 1989 by Nurah al-Saad (Nūrah ˀāl Saˁad). This piece offers the reader a precious insight about the reality of expats’ lives in the 1980s. The story depicts the harsh daily routine of an Asian immigrant, who attempts to survive by selling newspapers under the scorching sun in the streets of Doha. The main character, named Malik (Mālik), has just moved away from his family and is now dreaming of a better future, while finding himself in an entirely different reality: he is forced to work two jobs, in order to be able to live with some dignity and to help his family of origin. This short story was highly acclaimed by literary critics. Due to its original topic and narrative techniques, through the use of interior monologue, associations, stream of consciousness and symbols, it is considered a pioneering work for that time.
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