1 / 38

Corpus Linguistics for Understanding the Quran

Corpus Linguistics for Understanding the Quran. Eric Atwell, Kais Dukes, Nora Abbas , Abdul- Baquee Muhammad I-AIBS Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Biological Systems School of Computing University of Leeds.

hachi
Download Presentation

Corpus Linguistics for Understanding the Quran

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Corpus Linguistics for Understanding the Quran Eric Atwell, Kais Dukes, Nora Abbas, Abdul-Baquee Muhammad I-AIBS Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Biological Systems School of Computing University of Leeds

  2. The Challenge: An interdisciplinary approach to understanding the Quran

  3. (1) What is the Quran? The last in a series of 5 religious texts

  4. (1) What is the Quran? The central religious text of Islam • - Classical Arabic • Islamic Law (legal logic) • Divine guidance & direction • Scientific & philosophical knowledge • Has inspired many scientific achievements, e.g. Algebra and linguistics

  5. (2) Traditional Arabic Linguistics Originated in Arabs studying the language of the Quran (detailed analysis for at least 1000 years): - Orthography (diacritics and vowelization) - Etymology (Semitic roots) - Morphology (derivation and inflection) - Syntax (origins of dependency grammar) - Discourse Analysis & Rhetoric - Semantics & Pragmatics

  6. (3) Computational Linguistics Where are we now? • Current use of computing to analyze the Quran is mostly… • - Keyword search (useful) • - Frequency analysis (numerology?)

  7. (3) Computational Linguistics - How far can we go? - Is an artificial intelligence system realistic? • Example question-answering dialog system: • Question • How long should I breastfeed my child for? • Answer Mothers should suckle their offspring for two years, if the father wishes to complete the term (The Holy Quran, Verse 2:233).

  8. An AI approach to understanding the Quran Central Hypothesis Augmenting the text of the Quran with rich annotation will lead to a more accurate AI system. - Prepare the data by annotating the Quran. - Use the data to build an AI system for concept search and question-answering.

  9. Annotating the Quran Challenges Orthography - Complex script verified in Unicode? Morphology - Arabic is highly inflected and this is challenging to model by computer Syntax - Phrase structure or dependency grammar? Semantics – lexical semantics, ontology, logic, lexical frames?

  10. Annotating the Quran Solutions - Recent computational advances have made possible annotating the Quran to very high accuracy - Community effort using volunteers - Leverage existing resources from Traditional Arabic Grammar - Automatic annotation followed by manual verification

  11. Recent Advances: Orthography Does an accurate digital copy of the Quran exist? • Encoding Issues • Missing diacritics • Simplified script (not Uthmani) • Windows code page 1256, not Unicode Google Search for verse (68:38) on Jan 21, 2008 shows many typos

  12. Recent Advances: Orthography • Tanzil Project (http://tanzil.info) • Stable version released May 2008 • Uses Unicode XML encoding, including the special characters designed for the complex Arabic script of the Quran • Manually verified to 100% accuracy by a group of experts who have memorized the entire text of the Quran

  13. Recent Advances: Orthography • Java Quran API (http://jqurantree.org) • March 2009 • Java classes for querying the Tanzil XML of the Quran • First step towards software package for analyzing the Quran

  14. Recent Advances: Morphology • - Buckwalter Arabic Morphological Analyzer (2002) • Morphological Analysis of the Quran at the University of Haifa, Israel (2004) • - Lexeme & feature based morphological representation of Arabic (Nizar Habash, 2006)

  15. The Haifa Corpus (2004) • Multiple analysis for each word (up to 5) • rbb+fa&l+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Sg+Pron+Dependent+1P+Sg • rbb+fa&l+Noun+Triptotic+Masc+Sg+Gen • Not a manually verified corpus • Authors reports an F-measure of 86% • Non-standard annotation scheme not familiar to traditional Arabic linguists (e.g. extracting a list of all verbs in the corpus is non-trivial) • Arabic text is only encoded phonetically instead of using the original Arabic. Searching for the possible morphological analyses for a specific word is not easy

  16. The Quranic Arabic Corpus • http://corpus.quran.com • - Manually verified (99% accuracy) • Poplar website with very positive feedback • million(s) of visitors 1. Initial tagging using Buckwalter Analyzer 2. Paid annotator working for 3 months 3. Community of volunteers verifying against existing books of Traditional Arabic Grammar which analyse the Quran Shows Arabic and English morphological analysis side-by-side, with phonetic transcription, search and translation.

  17. The Quranic Arabic Corpus http://corpus.quran.com/ • Kais Dukes Arabic Language Computing Applied to the Quran – PhD (part-time) an open-source online focus for linguistic research on Classical Arabic: morphology - each word shows colour-coded morphological analysis syntax - each verse shows dependecy parse following Arabic tradition semantics - entitites and concepts are linked to an ontology translation - word-for-word English translations to aid understanding Machine Learning - annotations provide training data for a parser Impact on society - dozens of researchers collaborated on the analysis and over a million visitors have used the website this year.

  18. The Quranic Arabic CorpusPart-of-speech Tagging • Part-of-speech tags adapted from Traditional Arabic Grammar, and mapped to English equivalents (not the other way around) • These tags apply to words in the Quran, as well as to individual morphological segments in the text

  19. The Quranic Arabic CorpusVerified Uthmani Script • Unicode Uthmani Script • Sourced from the verified Tanzil project

  20. The Quranic Arabic CorpusPhonetics (faja'alnāhumu) • Phonetic transcription generated algorithmically • Guided by Arabic vowelized diacritics

  21. The Quranic Arabic CorpusInterlinear translation • Word-for-word translation from accepted sources • Interlinear translation scheme

  22. The Quranic Arabic CorpusLocation Reference(21:70:4) • Common standard for verses (Chapter:Verse) • Extended in the QAC corpus to include word numbers and segment numbers, e.g. (21:70:4:2)

  23. The Quranic Arabic CorpusMorphological Segmentation • Division of a single word into multiple segments • Part-of-speech tag assigned to each segment • - Traditional Arabic Grammar rules used for division

  24. The Quranic Arabic CorpusMorphological segment features

  25. The Quranic Arabic CorpusArabic Grammar Summary

  26. The Quranic Arabic TreebankSyntactic Annotation • Dependency Grammar based onإعراب (i'rāb) • Syntactico-semantic roles for each word

  27. The Quranic Arabic TreebankWhat’s new about this research? • First Treebank of Classical Arabic • Free Treebank of the Quran • - Well-defined formal representation of Traditional Arabic Grammar using hybrid constituency/dependency graphs

  28. Automatic AnnotationClassical Arabic Dependency Parser • Joakim Nivre (2009) dependency parsing using a shift/reduce queue/stack architecture with machine learning • Following similar architecture, but with hand written rules, custom parser has an • F-measure of 77.2%

  29. Quran ‘Search for a Concept’ Tool Nora Abbas developed the first Quran "search for a concept" tool and website, Qurany; Noorhan Abbas. Qurany: A Tool to Search for Concepts in the Quran (PDF). MSc by Research Thesis, School of Computing, Leeds University, 2009

  30. Quran ‘Search for a Concept’ Tools • The SearchTruth tool 48% • Search Truth http://www.searchtruth.com/ • The Holy Quran Viewer tool 34% • Holy Quran Viewer http://www.2muslims.com/directory/Detailed/223253.shtml • The University of Southern California tool 49% • MSA-USC Qur’an Database http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/reference/searchquran.html • What the available Quran tools on the net provide? • What is the main problem with these tools? What about the Recall value of their results? • What is the main reason for these poor results?

  31. Quran ‘Search for a Concept’ Tool • What is a CONCEPT? • NOT just a “keyword” • “index term” in a textbook?

  32. Quran ‘Search for a Concept’ Tool • General/Abstract Concepts: • Women’s financial status • Main pillars of Islam • Characteristics of Paradise • Concrete Concepts: • Names of places • (Makkah, Mecca, Meccah) • Names of prophets, angels,…etc. • (Musa, Moses) • Names of Holy Books • (The Book (Bible), Bible, New Testament)

  33. Quran ‘Search for a Concept’ Tool 1 2 3 4 5 • What does my tool look like? 6

  34. Quran ‘Search for a Concept’ Tool Handling the Concrete Concepts • Eight Parallel English Translations • Search for one English word or a group of words in one search request • Search for one Arabic word or a group of words in one search request • Search for a mixed list of Arabic and English words in one search request • Offers a list of synonyms for the English words

  35. Quran ‘Search for a Concept’ Tool • General/Abstract Concepts • It is imported from ‘Mushaf Al Tajweed’ index of topics published by Dar Al-Maarifa in Syria. • The tool has 15 main concepts. • The tool covers all the concepts in both languages Arabic and English. • The total number of concepts covered is 1170. • For example, to represent: • Women’s financial status • Main pillars of Islam • Characteristics of Paradise

  36. Knowledge representation and text mining of the Qur'an • Abdul-Baquee Muhammad • http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/scsams/ • http://www.textminingthequran.com/wiki

  37. Qur'anic ApplicationsText Mining The Quran Verse similarity: Allows you to see all verses that share a certain percent of characters with your input verse. Quranic Chapter Relatives allows you to see the strongest relatives of a given Quran Chapter. Word Cloud: See word clouds of a sura or group of suras of the Qur'anic. Qur'an Concordance: Concordance over lemma. Part-of-Speech Display of Sura: View a sura of the Qur'an with color-coded Part of speech tags. Quranic word co-occurence: Allows you to enter a quranic terms to finds its most frequent neighbors. N-gram Search: Search upto 5-gram phrases of the Quran with a frequency of 5 or more. Pronoun References: Given a verse, see all pronoun references within this verse. List of Concepts: See a list of concepts arising from Pronoun referents in the Quran.

  38. AI for understanding the Quran Kais Dukes developed the first online annotated linguistic resource which shows the Arabic "irab" morphology and grammar for each word and verse in the Holy Quran, the Quranic Arabic Corpus including word-by-word morphology and English gloss, and Ontology of Quranic concepts; Nora Abbas developed the first Quran "search for a concept" tool and website, Qurany; Abdul-Baquee Sharaf developed tools and resources for text mining the Quranincluding verse similarity, lemma concordance and collocation, and text mining the Hadeeth

More Related