Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering

, Volume 41, Issue 12, pp 5205–5214 | Cite as

Semantic Q&A System on the Qur’an

Research Article - Computer Engineering and Computer Science
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Abstract

The Qur’an is considered the first source of knowledge and guidance for Muslims throughout the world. It is hard to understand and interpret without consulting domain experts and specialized Qur’anic books. Therefore we believe that a system based on simple questions written in Arabic and capable of retrieving answers from the Qur’an would be of a great interest to all those who want to study the Qur’an. In recent years, a number of researches have been conducted to facilitate the retrieval of knowledge from the Qur’an; however, most of the available researches are based on keyword search and do not rely on semantics. Building a semantic-based system has a number of challenges such as the lack of resources for the Arabic language and the difficulty to model the content of the Qur’an by fear of altering its right meaning. In this paper, we introduce a semantic-based search engine for the Qur’an, it is based on creating an ontology that represents the Qur’an knowledge in Web Ontology Language format, and a natural language interface that transforms user queries expressed in Arabic into SPARQL queries and then retrieves answers from the ontology.

Keywords

Qur’an Ontology Knowledge extraction Semantic search 
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Copyright information

© King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of MathematicsCady Ayyad UniversityMarrakeshMorocco

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