School of Computing Research Colloquium - The Quranic Arabic Corpus: working with users and developers

Category: Corpus Linguistics; research talks
Date: Friday 14 November 2014

Date: Friday 14 November 2014, 11:30 - 12:30
Category: Corpus Linguistics; research talks

School of Computing Research Colloquium, University of Leeds - The Quranic Arabic Corpus: working with users and developers

Dr Kais Dukes, Stream Financial Ltd & School of Computing, University of Leeds

Friday 14/11/14, 11:30-12:30

School of Computing Staff Room, EC Stoner Building 9.21

The Quranic Arabic Corpus is the first and only online multimodal
resource showing the established traditional Arabic "irab" morphology
and grammar for each word and verse in the Holy Quran, as well as
word-by-word morphology and English gloss, audio recordings, pronoun
references, and Ontology of Quranic concepts. It also constitutes a
novel model for "supervised crowdsourcing" of research resources. The
QAC has been used as an academic resource for Machine Learning taggers
and parsers, Quranic Studies, and Arabic linguistics and language
learning. It also has social impact: the million plus visits a year are
mainly by non-Arabic-speakers, gaining a deeper insight into the
original Classical Arabic text through the linguistic annotations.
Encouraged by support from the British Muslim community and users
world-wide, Kais Dukes plans to work with willing volunteer users and
developers to extend the Quranic Arabic Corpus website, to include
further linguistic and semantic analyses, further religious texts, and
additional resources for learning and teaching.

Dr Kais Dukes was Leeds University Engineering PhD Student of the Year,
and one of the first Leeds University PhD students to win a Research
Excellence award for his Thesis: "Statistical Parsing by Machine
Learning from a Classical Arabic Treebank" (2013).