Extracting semantic relations from the Quranic Arabic based on Arabic conjunctive patterns

Abstract

There is an immense need for information systems that rely on Arabic Quranic ontologies to provide a precise and comprehensive knowledge to the world. Since semantic relations are a vital component in any ontology and many applications in Natural Language Processing strongly depend on them, this motivates the development of our approach to extract semantic relations from the Quranic Arabic Corpus, written in Arabic script, and enrich the automatic construction of Quran ontology. We focus on semantic relations resulting from proposed conjunctive patterns which include two terms with the conjunctive AND enclosed in between. The strength of each relation is measured based on the correlation coefficient. Finally, we evaluate the significance of this method by using hypotheses testing and Student t-test. The obtained results are very promising since we combine an accurate Arabic grammar with strong statistical techniques to prove the existence and measure the strength of this type of semantic relations.