Tagging narrator’s names in Hadith text

No AbstractKeywords: tagging; hadith text; nam

Towards a better understanding of Tarajem: creating topological networks for Arabic biographical dictionaries

Biographical writing is one of the earliest and most extensive forms of Arabic literature. Some scholars tend to assume that classical Arabic biographies, widely known as Tarāǧim, arose in conjunction with the study of the reliability of the Hadith transmitters (the reciters of the Prophet Mohammad's sayings) which lead to a proliferation of biographical material collected and used to assess the transmitter's trustworthiness . However, a scrutiny of the well-known classical Arabic biographical dictionaries such as Siyaru 'A`lāmi an-Nubalā' `The Lives of the Noble Figures' for Adh-Dhahabī shows that they extend their entries to other classes of persons important to the development of particular fields such as Islamic jurisprudents, rulers, poets, philosophers or physicians. The main contribution of Arabic biographical dictionaries is the cumulative value of the thousands of life histories which construct a picture of the Islamic society in different eras. An Arabic biographical dictionary, therefore, is predominantly used by scholars to look up an eminent person's achievements and historical background. In this project, however, we explore Arabic biographies as a prosopography, rather than a biography in the strict sense. We introduce a novel method for a better understanding of Arabic biographical dictionaries by creating a network of relations among different persons. We utilise Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to create a topological network from the unstructured data of 45,500 biographical entries collected from different dictionaries. We aim to illustrate how network analysis leveraged by NLP tools can provide scholars with innovative methods for discovering complex constellation of relations between prominent and non-prominent figures spanning over several eras and from different fields of knowledge. We also use graph visualisation as a means to effectively communicate and explore such complex constellations. Each network visualisation is purposefully designed to be as simple and robust as possible to offer scholars a way to move relatively fluidly between the large scale of biographical entries and to easily interpret the minute ties between persons of different walks of life. We make both our data and code publicly available for researchers to replicate the experiment. It can be found at:https://github.com/sadanyh/Relational-Network-for-Arabic-Taraje

A hybrid approach for arabic semantic relation extraction

Information retrieval applications are essential tools to manage the huge amount of information in the Web. Ontologies have great importance in these applications. The idea here is that several data belonging to a domain of interest are represented and related semantically in the ontology, which can help to navigate, manage and reuse these data. Despite of the growing need of ontology, only few works were interested in Arabic language. Indeed, arabic texts are highly ambiguous, especially when diacritics are absent. Besides, existent works does not cover all the types of se-mantic relations, which are useful to structure Arabic ontol-ogies. A lot of work has been done on cooccurrence- based techniques, which lead to over-generation. In this paper, we propose a new approach for Arabic se-mantic relation extraction. We use vocalized texts to reduce ambiguities and propose a new distributional approach for similarity calculus, which is compared to cooccurrence. We discuss our contribution through experimental results and propose some perspectives for future research

Ensemble Morphosyntactic Analyser for Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic (CA) is an influential language for Muslim lives around the world. It is the language of two sources of Islamic laws: the Quran and the Sunnah, the collection of traditions and sayings attributed to the prophet Mohammed. However, classical Arabic in general, and the Sunnah, in particular, is underexplored and under-resourced in the field of computational linguistics. This study examines the possible directions for adapting existing tools, specifically morphological analysers, designed for modern standard Arabic (MSA) to classical Arabic. Morphological analysers of CA are limited, as well as the data for evaluating them. In this study, we adapt existing analysers and create a validation data-set from the Sunnah books. Inspired by the advances in deep learning and the promising results of ensemble methods, we developed a systematic method for transferring morphological analysis that is capable of handling different labelling systems and various sequence lengths. In this study, we handpicked the best four open access MSA morphological analysers. Data generated from these analysers are evaluated before and after adaptation through the existing Quranic Corpus and the Sunnah Arabic Corpus. The findings are as follows: first, it is feasible to analyse under-resourced languages using existing comparable language resources given a small sufficient set of annotated text. Second, analysers typically generate different errors and this could be exploited. Third, an explicit alignment of sequences and the mapping of labels is not necessary to achieve comparable accuracies given a sufficient size of training dataset. Adapting existing tools is easier than creating tools from scratch. The resulting quality is dependent on training data size and number and quality of input taggers. Pipeline architecture performs less well than the End-to-End neural network architecture due to error propagation and limitation on the output format. A valuable tool and data for annotating classical Arabic is made freely available

Ontology-based approach to semantically enhanced question answering for closed domain: a review

Abstract: For many users of natural language processing (NLP), it can be challenging to obtain concise, accurate and precise answers to a question. Systems such as question answering (QA) enable users to ask questions and receive feedback in the form of quick answers to questions posed in natural language, rather than in the form of lists of documents delivered by search engines. This task is challenging and involves complex semantic annotation and knowledge representation. This study reviews the literature detailing ontology-based methods that semantically enhance QA for a closed domain, by presenting a literature review of the relevant studies published between 2000 and 2020. The review reports that 83 of the 124 papers considered acknowledge the QA approach, and recommend its development and evaluation using different methods. These methods are evaluated according to accuracy, precision, and recall. An ontological approach to semantically enhancing QA is found to be adopted in a limited way, as many of the studies reviewed concentrated instead on NLP and information retrieval (IR) processing. While the majority of the studies reviewed focus on open domains, this study investigates the closed domain

Having Change and Making Change: Muslim Moral Transformations in Post-Suharto Jakarta, Indonesia.

The collapse of the Suharto-led New Order regime in 1998 set off a cascade of social, legal and political reforms in Indonesia. Set against a history of the colonial and postcolonial management of religion in the archipelago, this dissertation analyzes the moral interventions of two small-scale organizations that emerged amid the ferment of the post-Suharto years. I argue that colonial attempts to limit the political potentials of Islam, continued under successive postcolonial regimes, continue to shape the prospects for “change” available to contemporary Indonesians. This sets the stage for an analysis of the local iteration of an international moral renewal movement called “Initiatives of Change.” Exploring how processes of assimilation and translation domesticate foreign knowledge and practices, I arrive at a corrective to much recent scholarship on Islam. Observations made at Initiatives of Change Indonesia suggest that excessive attention to “piety” has obscured other ethical concerns shaping Muslim subjectivities. I contend that revisiting the central Islamic concept of adab – “right relations” – allows for new understandings of the social dimensions of projects of moral reform. The project then shifts to a discussion of related processes at work in another organization (Kahfi Motivator School), as it disseminates the hybrid discourse of Islamic Hypnotherapy. Kahfi Motivator School, I argue, relies on the presumptive epistemic neutrality of (psychological) science to forge a novel synthesis of “western” technologies and Islamic moral aspirations. Turning finally to Indonesian motivational speaking practices, understood in relation to the global traditions in which they participate, I maintain that the supposed transparency of “self-help” and “popular psychology” demand far greater scrutiny – in Indonesia and elsewhere. In place of the language of “neo-liberalism,” I foreground the particularistic motivations articulated by participants in these discourses. Propelled throughout by an ambition to productively re-assemble the “familiar” and the “strange,” this dissertation sits at the nexus of history, religious studies, and ethnographic inquiry.PHDAsian Languages and CulturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113599/1/saulwall_1.pd

Undergraduate Student Catalog 2013-2014

The central pillars of Qatar University’s mission are highlighted through this document, namely the provision of high-quality education and the pursuit of an active role in the development of Qatari society. The courses described here have been designed, reviewed and assessed to meet the highest educational standards, with a strong focus on the knowledge and skill-based learning that is needed for a graduate to be competitive in today’s labor market and in graduate education pursuits. The many of the academic programs have attained independent external accreditation from internationally recognized associations, to cater to the needs of the country’s ambitious development course