Abstract:
Qur’an, being the highest authoritative source of the Divine knowledge and wisdom has
been widely and deeply studied, analyzed, memorized and recited by Muslims as well as
non-Muslims in the past centuries. With the advancement in the Information
Technology, a number of Information Retrieval, multimedia and Natural Language
Processing (NLP) tools have been developed for recital, memorization and search from
the Arabic and English translated text of the Holy Qur’an. This research is an attempt to
incorporate the semantics in the Qur’an search. In this research we introduce a
framework based on a variant of widely used WordNet database particularly for the
English translation of the Qur’an. The target data set comprising Chapter 2 of English
Translated Qur’an has been annotated using this framework. A front end query
enhancement procedure has been developed which expands the user’s query based on the
proposed framework and performs the search on the annotated text of Qur’an. The
results are promising with almost 59% precision and 59% recall for abstract user
queries which do not directly appear in the text of the Qur’an in their syntax and
morphology. For non-abstract terms that directly occur in the Qur’an, the QuEST system
returns results with an average of 77% precision and 88% recall which are higher than
any other online tool. A concept hierarchy of Qur’anic terms recognized automatically
and semi-automatically, is a major contribution of this research.
