Leveraging Crowdsourcing for the Thematic Annotation of the Qur'an

Abstract

In this paper, we illustrate how we leverage crowdsourcing to create workflows for knowledge engineering in specialized and knowledge intensive domains. We undertake the special case of the Arabic script of the Qur'an, a widely studied manuscript, and attempt to employ crowdsourcing methods for its thematic annotation at the sub-verse level, for which, there is no standardized knowledge model available to date. We demonstrate that our proposed method presents feasibility to achieve reliable annotations in an efficient and scalable manner. The proposed methodology and framework is meant to be generalizable to other knowledge intensive and specialized domains.