Support us

PROJECT PRESENTATION – QURANIC ARABIC CORPUS

This course has finished

by: Dr Kais Dukes

With support from Ebrahim College, IMASE and Ibn Jabal Institute

In a world where algorithms run every aspect of our society, given its arabic roots, its ironic to see the world of Islamic Studies still yet to embrace benefits of computational linguistics. With a plethora of Quranic Arabic websites and apps, many claiming all sorts, very few can match resourcefulness and of ‘value add’ as Dr Kais’s ‘Quranic Arabic Corpus’ site, which is an educational resource to study and learn Classical Arabic online.

Used by over 2 million people each year, the Quranic Arabic Corpus is an annotated linguistic resource consisting of 77,430 words of Quranic Arabic. The project aims to provide morphological and syntactic annotations for researchers wanting to study the language of the Quran.

The grammatical analysis helps readers further in uncovering the detailed intended meanings of each verse and sentence. Each word of the Quran is tagged with its part-of-speech as well as multiple morphological features. Unlike other annotated Arabic corpora, the grammar framework adopted by the Quranic Corpus is the traditional Arabic grammar of i’rab (إﻋﺮﺍﺏ).

In this presentation, Dr Kais will talk about the project, its objectives and impact and future ambitions and how it can help those studying Quran and arabic in general and possibilities into moving to hadith corpus. This project is particularly of importance to Quran teachers, arabic teachers, academics of Quranic Studies and anyone interested in computational linguistics with potential if used properly revolutionize study and learning of Classical Arabic online.

Dr Kais Dukes

Dr Kais Dukes was born to an English father who converted to Islam and Saudi mother, and grew up bilingual. He graduated and completed his Masters at Imperial College, and PhD Computer Science, University of Leeds on Quranic Arabic natural language processing with machine learning and statistical parsing. For the wide and global impact of his PhD research he was awarded Postgraduate Researcher of the Year (2011) and this year, PhD Thesis Research Excellence Award (2014) from the University of Leeds. As Artificial Intelligence scientist and software developer, in particular .NET Framework enthusiast, Dukes began work in the early 2000s on one of the world’s largest financial software systems using the framework and has worked with many investment banks and financial institutions and his work was awarded the Winner of the Banking Technology Awards (2012). Currently he works as a software engineer in an investment bank and lives with his wife and children in London.

Click image to enlarge