Processing the Text of the Holy Quran: a Text Mining Study

Abstract

The Holy Quran is the reference book for more than 1.6 billion of Muslims all around the world Extracting information and knowledge from the Holy Quran is of high benefit for both specialized people in Islamic studies as well as non-specialized people. This paper initiates a series of research studies that aim to serve the Holy Quran and provide helpful and accurate information and knowledge to the all human beings. Also, the planned research studies aim to lay out a framework that will be used by researchers in the field of Arabic natural language processing by providing a ”Golden Dataset” along with useful techniques and information that will advance this field further. The aim of this paper is to find an approach for analyzing Arabic text and then providing statistical information which might be helpful for the people in this research area. In this paper, the holy Quran text is preprocessed and then different text mining operations are applied to it to reveal simple facts about the terms of the holy Quran. The results show a variety of characteristics of the Holy Quran such as its most important words, its wordcloud and chapters with high term frequencies. All these results are based on term frequencies that are calculated using both Term Frequency (TF) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) methods.