Extracting Topics from the Holy Quran Using Generative Models

The holy Quran is one of the Holy Books of God. It is considered one of the main references for an estimated 1.6 billion of Muslims around the world. The Holy Quran language is Arabic. Specialized as well as non-specialized people in religion need to search and lookup certain information from the Holy Quran. Most research projects concentrate on the translation of the holy Quran in different languages. Nevertheless, few research projects pay attention to original text of the holy Quran in Arabic language. Keyword search is one of the Information Retrieval (IR) methods but will retrieve what is called exact search. Semantic search aims at finding deeper meanings of a text, and it is a hot field of study in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this paper topic modeling techniques are explored to setup a framework for semantic search in the holy Quran. As the Holy Quran is the word of God, its meanings are unlimited. In this paper the words of chapter Joseph (Peace Be Upon Him (PBUH)) from the Holy Quran is analyzed based on topic modeling techniques as a case study. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling technique has been applied in this paper into two structures (Hizb Quarters and verses) of Joseph chapter as: words, roots and stems. The log-Likelihood has been calculated for the two structures of the chapter. Results show that the best structure to use is verses, which gives the least energy for data. Some of the results of the attained topics are shown. These results suggest that topic modeling techniques failed to capture in an accurate manner the coherent topics of the chapter. Keywords—Statistical models; Latent Dirichlet Analysis (LDA); Holy Quran; Unsupervised Learning