Vocabulary of Quranic Concepts: A semi-automatically created terminology of Holy Quran

Abstract

The identification and organization of terminology is the foremost step while organizing the domain knowledge for any domain as it is the terms and their inter-relationships that define the conceptual knowledge base. Quran, comprising the divine words of wisdom has been considered and used as prime source of knowledge and guidance for Muslims throughout the world for fourteen centuries. The concepts/topics discussed in Quran have been organized/indexed by many scholars which are used by Muslims who use them to search for guidance regarding various issues of daily life. In current era of information technology, various search services for Quranic topics are available online. They mostly use the terminologies (concepts hierarchy) manually built by scholars. In our work, we have used a semi-automatic approach to identify important concepts/topics from six English translations of Quran, and organized them into a hierarchical structure, named as Vocabulary of Quranic Concepts (VQC). CNC Value method of term recognition is used to identify significant concepts, which are then manually analyzed by domain expert, and are then organized into a hierarchy using the term-head principle. Due to extreme sensitivity of this work, complete automation of system is avoided and outcomes at all steps are manually analyzed. Currently, we have developed a vocabulary from translation of only second chapter of Quran (Al-Bakara). VQC is available at: https://sites.google.com/a/mcs.edu.pk/codteem/projects/qwn