Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A Novel Quranic Search Engine Using an Ontology-Based Semantic Indexing

  • Research Article-Computer Engineering and Computer Science
  • Published:
Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Quran is the most significant religious document in the Arabic language in Islamic law. Several Quranic search engines have been designed and widely used for the past two decades. However, these search engines have certain limitations. For example, in many cases, the search is unable to retrieve relevant verses because it is based on keywords or root search and does not rely on the semantic relation between words in the query. The main objective of the present paper is to design a semantic search engine based on ontology as an index. In our work, we focus on creating a new ontology for Quranic document based on a set of useful words extracted from the Quranic Earab book with grammatical functions that serve as concepts. This ontology will be used as an index in information retrieval. The main idea is to create links between the existing Quranic words in the same verse, which will be used with user’s query to find the desired verses. We developed a graphical user interface with free and multiple inputs that convert users’ Arabic queries into SPARQL queries and then retrieve relevant verses from the ontology. The obtained results show that our proposal provides heightened precision and recall compared to other search engines.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Baron, M.S.; Valencia, K.S.: An approach to smantic indexing and information retrieval. 2009. Rev.fac.ing.univ. Antioquia, Medellín n. 48, 174–187, June 2009. http://www.scielo.org.co/ (2019). Accessed on 23 Mar 2019

  2. Buscaldi, D.; Figueroa, M.C.S.: Effects of ontology pitfalls on ontology-based information retrieval systems. 2014. KEOD 2013, Sep 2013, Vilamoura, Portugal. p. 51, hal-01068259 (2013)

  3. Fluher, C.: Le traitement du langage naturel dans la recherche d’information. In: Intelligent Interface for Scientific and Technical Information, Klingenthal: INRIA, pp. 103–130 (1992)

  4. Pomart, S.E.: Indexation, Article of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Information and Documentation. Paris, Nathan, pp. 284–287 (1997)

  5. El Bazzi, S.M.; Zaki, T.E.; Mammass, D.; Ennaji, A.: Automatic indexing of Arabic documents: state of the art (2016)

  6. Dennai, A.; Benslimane, S.M.: Si of web documents based on domain ontology. I.J. Information Technology and Computer Science. 02, 1-11 Published Online January 2015 in MECS http://www.mecs-press.org/ (2015)

  7. Alqahtani, M.; Atwell, E.: Arabic Quranic search tool based on ontology. In: Métais, E., Meziane, F., Saraee, M., Sugumaran, V., Vadera, S. (eds.) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9612, pp. 478–485. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41754-7_52

  8. Fabien Gandon: Ontologies and multi-agent systems for a corporate semantic web. 2002. INRIA and University of Nice—Sophia Antipolis—Doctoral School of Sciences and Technologies of Information and Communication (S.T.I.C.)

  9. Gruber, T.R.: A translation approach to portable ontology specifications. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Computer Science Department Stanford. University Stanford, California 94305, vol. 5, pp. 199–220 (1993)

  10. Lee, C.S.; Kao, Y.F.; Kuo, Y.H.; Wang, M.H.: Automated ontology construction for unstructured text documents. Data Knowl. Eng. 60(3), 547–566 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2006.04.001

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Taa, A., Abdullah, M.S., Ali, A.B.M., Ahmad, M.: Themes-based classification for al-quran knowledge ontology. In: International Conference on ICT Convergence, pp. 89–94 (2014)

  12. Hakkoum, A.; Raghay, S.: Semantic q&a system on the qur’an. Arab. J. Sci. Eng 41, 5205–5214 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Beirade, F.; Azzoune, H.; Zegour, D.E.: Semantic query for quranic ontology. J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2019.04.005

  14. Abbas, N.: Quran search for a concept tool and website quran search for a concept tool and website (July), Master of Science by Research, The University of Leeds School of Computing (2017)

  15. Mohamed, E.H.; Shokry, E.M.: QSST: a quranic semantic search tool based on word embedding. J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci. (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2020.01.004

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Qassem. 2017. http://quran.ksu.edu.sa/tafseer/eerab/sura2-aya1.html#eerab. Accessed on 12 Aug 2017 at (22:40)

  17. Sobhi, A.R.A: , (the objective dictionary of verses of the holy qur’an). 1990. N pages 832. https://islamhouse.com/ar/books/2823839/ (2020). Accessed at 17 Nov 2020.

  18. Ishkewy, H.; FarahatAzhar, H.: Azhary: an Arabic lexical ontology. Int. J. Web Seman. Technol. (IJWesT) 5(4), 71–82 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Zouaoui, S., Rezeg, K.: Ontological approach based on multi-agent system for indexing and filtering Arabic documents. J. Digit. Inf. Manag. (JDIM) (2019)

  20. Elkateb, S. et al.: Building awordnet for Arabic. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Genoa, Italy (2006)

  21. Abouenour, L.; et al.: On the evaluation and improvement of Arabic wordnet coverage and usability. Lang. Resour. Eval. 47(3), 891917 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Elmalki, T.: , . http://arabicontology.org/ (2014). Accessed at 17 Nov 2020

  23. Jarrar, M.: Building a formal Arabic ontology. In: Proceedings of the Experts Meeting on Arabic Ontologies and Semantic Networks. Alecso, Arab League. Tunis, 26–28 April 2011

  24. Abderrahim, M.E., Abderrahim, M.A.: Using Arabic wordnet for semantic indexation in information retrieval system. IJCSI Int. J. Comput. Sci. (2013) arXiv:1306.2499

  25. Belkredim, F.Z.: AE Sebai: An ontology based formalism for the Arabic language using verbs and their derivatives. Commun. IBIMA 11, 44–52 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Mousser, J.: A large coverage verb lexicon for Arabic. In: Proceedings of the 7th Conference on International: Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Valetta, Malta (2010)

  27. Levin, B.: English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Bouzoubaa, K.; Kabbaj, A.; Rosso, P.; Abouenour, L.; Nasri, M.: Construction of an ontology for intelligent Arabic QA systems leveraging the conceptual graphs representation. J. Intell. Fuzzy Syst. 27(6), 2869–2881 (2014). https://doi.org/10.3233/IFS-141248

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Suryana, N.; Utomo, F.S.; Azmi, M.S.: Quran ontology: review on recent development and open research issues. J. Theor. Appl. Inf. Technol. 96(3), 568–581 (2018)

  30. Alqahtani, M.; Atwell, E.: Arabic Quranic Search Tool Based on Ontology. Springer, Berlin (2016)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  31. Zaki elkhedre, M.: Towards the treatment of semantique in the Arabic language through databases preliminary study of the text of the holy quran. In: Seventeenth National Conference on Computers, (Informatics in the service of the guests of Rahman). King Abdulaziz University, Medina (2004)

  32. Assem. Alfanous—advanced quranic search engine. http://www.alfanous.org/ (2018). Accessed on 17 Jan. 2020

  33. Dukes, K.: The quranic Arabic corpus. http://corpus.quran.com (2019). Accessed on 10 Nov 2019

  34. Abdelnasser, H.: Al-bayan: An arabic question answering system for the holy quran. In: Proceedings of the EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP). pp/ 57–64, Oct 25, Doha, Qatar (2014)

  35. Atwell, E.; Brierley, C.; Dukes, K.; Sawalha, M.; Sharaf, A.B.: An artificial intelligence approach to arabic and islamic content on the internet. In: Proceedings of NITS 3rd National Information Technology Symposium (2011)

  36. Abbas, N.H.: Quran Search for a Concept Tool and Website. M. Sc. thesis, University of Leeds (School of Computing) (2009)

  37. Bentrcia, R.; Zidat, S.; Marir, F.: Extracting semantic relations from the Quranic Arabic based on Arabic conjunctive patterns. J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci. 30(3), 382–390 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Khan, H.Ullah; Saqlain, S.Muhammad; Shoaib, M.; Sher, M.: Ontology based semantic search in holy quran. Int. J. Fut. Comput. Commun. 2, 570–575 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Alsammaka, I.L.H.; Sahibb, H.M.A.; Nasirc, lS: Ontology-based model for information retrieval: an application of time nouns in Nahj Al-Balagha. J. Univ. Babylon Pure Appl. Sci. 27(4), 248–257 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  40. Afzal, H.; Mukhtar, T.: Semantically Enhanced Concept Search of the Holy Quran: Qur’anic English WordNet. Arab. J. Sci. Eng. 44, 3953–3966 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Dukes, K.: Quran project www.corpus.quran.com (2010). Accessed 15 Jul 2017

  42. Search. Search in the holy quran—search engine. https://equran.me/search.html (2020). Accessed on 17 Jan 2020

  43. Bilarabi. , (Earab of Arabic sentences). https://technoarabi.com/download-belarabi/ (2019). Accessed at 23/12/2019 at 22:22

  44. Iqbal, R.; Mustapha, A.; Yusoff, Z.M.: An experience of developing quran ontology with contextual information support. Multicult. Educ. Technol. J. 7(4), 333–343 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Al-Nasser, A., Harrag, F.: Using association rules for ontology extraction from a quran corpus. In: 5th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing (CITALA 2014), Oujda, Morocco (2014)

  46. Alromima, W.; Moawad, I.F.; Elgohary, R.; Aref, M.: Ontology-based model for Arabic lexicons: an application of the place nouns in the holy Quran. In: 11th International Computer Engineering Conference (ICENCO). pp. 137–143

  47. Anam, T., Abdirazak, M., Shamsuzzaman, S.: Applying ontological modeling on quranic \(\ll \) nature \(\gg \) domain. In: 7th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS), pp. 151–155 (2016)

  48. Taa, A.; Abed, Q.A.; Ahmad, M.: Al-quran ontology based on knowledge themes. J. Fundam. Appl. Sci. 9(5S), 800 (2018). https://doi.org/10.4314/jfas.v9i5s.57

  49. Radaideh, G.H.; Al Zamil, M.: Automatic extraction of ontological relations from Arabic text. J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci. 26(4), 462–472 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  50. Al-eman. Earab quran. (2020). Accessed 10 Jan. 2020

  51. Al-Salman, A.; Al-arfaj, A.: Arabic NLP tools for ontology construction from Arabic text: an overview. In: 1st International Conference on Electrical and Information Technologies ICEIT’ pp. 246–251 (2015)

  52. Zaki, M.: Dictionnary of quran words ( ) (2005)

  53. Fernandez, M.; Gomez-Perez, A.; Juristo, N.: Methontology: from ontological arts towards ontological engineering. In: Proceedings of the AAAI97 Spring Symposium Series on Ontological Engineering, Stanford, USA, pp. 33–40 (1997)

  54. Protege. Prot\_ég\_é open-source ontology editor. http://protege.stanford.edu/ (2019). Accessed on 05 Nov 2019

  55. Jena. Apache Jena. https://jena.apache.org/ (2019). Accessed on Jan 28th, 2019. (21:10)

  56. Mosshaf. Ksu—electronic Mosshaf project “ayat”. https://quran.ksu.edu.sa/index.php (2018). Accessed on 04 April 2018

  57. Abdelali, A. et al.: A fast and furious segmenter for Arabic. In: NAACL http://qatsdemo.cloudapp.net/farasa/ (2016). Accessed at 27 Sept 2018

  58. Addagada, S.: Indexing and searching document collections using Lucene. In: University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations (2007)

  59. Sarhan, M.A.: Apache lucene analyzer for Arabic language with root based stemmer (2019). Accessed at 17 Jan 2020

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. LINFI Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Biskra, P.O. Box 145 RP, 07000, Biskra, Algeria

    Samia Zouaoui & Khaled Rezeg

Authors
  1. Samia Zouaoui
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Khaled Rezeg
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Samia Zouaoui.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zouaoui, S., Rezeg, K. A Novel Quranic Search Engine Using an Ontology-Based Semantic Indexing. Arab J Sci Eng 46, 3653–3674 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-020-05082-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-020-05082-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation