Generating Arabic Stop-Word for Hadith

Abstract

Stop-words or (function words) play a great role in performing various functions in sentences, but are still typically inadequate to use for retrieval. They consist of several elements such as common nouns, pronouns and prepositions. With that, there are several Arabic particles available in the online Khoja and Abu EL-Khair stoplist taken from various websites. Arabic stop-words’ main problem lies in accepting the prefixes and suffixes’ attachment. In the current paper, a new methodology for generating a general stop-word list has been proposed and applied on hadiths. In detail, hadith is defined as words, acts, deeds, traditions, silent approvals and character of Prophet Muhammad S.A.W. (peace be upon him). The current paper aims at examining the effect of removing stopwords from verification of hadiths. The problem is that the previously generated stop-word lists have been on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the most commonly used language in hadiths. A stop-word list of Hadith and a corpus-based list has been created to be used in the process of hadith verification. The effectiveness and success of Hadith verification when using the newly generated lists along with earlier generated lists of MSA, combining the Hadith lists have been compared with the MSA lists. The Hadith verification has been performed using sequential pattern mining. Lastly, the experiments have demonstrated that the general lists comprising hadith words showed a better performance compared to using the lists of MSA stopwords.