tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Understanding the thematic structure of the Qur’an: an exploratory multivariate approach"

In this paper, we develop a methodology for discovering the thematic structure of the Qur’an based on a fundamental idea in data mining and related disciplines: that, with respect to some collection of texts, the lexical frequency profiles of the individual texts are a good indicator of their conceptual content, and thus provide a reliable criterion for their classification relative to one another. This idea is applied to the discovery of thematic interrelationships among the suras (chapters) of the Qur’an by abstracting lexical frequency data from them and then applying hierarchical cluster analysis to that data. . | Understanding the thematic structure of the Qur an an exploratory multivariate approach Naglaa Thabet School of English Literature Language and Linguistics University of Newcastle Newcastle upon Tyne UK NE1 7RU Abstract In this paper we develop a methodology for discovering the thematic structure of the Qur an based on a fundamental idea in data mining and related disciplines that with respect to some collection of texts the lexical frequency profiles of the individual texts are a good indicator of their conceptual content and thus provide a reliable criterion for their classification relative to one another. This idea is applied to the discovery of thematic interrelationships among the suras chapters of the Qur an by abstracting lexical frequency data from them and then applying hierarchical cluster analysis to that data. The results reported here indicate that the proposed methodology yields usable results in understanding the Qur an on the basis of its lexical semantics. 1 Introduction The Qur an is one of the great religious books of the world and is at the heart of Islamic culture. Careful well-informed interpretation of the Qur an is fundamental both to the faith of millions of Muslims throughout the world and to the non-Islamic world s understanding of their religion. There is a long tradition of scholarly quranic interpretation and it has necessarily been based on traditional literary-historical methods of manual textual exegesis. However developments in electronic text representation and analysis now offer the opportunity of applying the technologies of newly-emerging research areas such as data mining Hand et al. 2001 to the interpretation of the Qur an. Studies on computational analyses of the Qur an are almost lacking. Contributions to this field include the development of a morphological analyser for the Qur an Dror et al. 2004 . The Qur an consists of 114 chapters called suras which range in length from the shortest Al-Kawthar .