Islam and Data Science Roundup

In “AI and Qur’anic Interpretation: Exploring the Ethical and Epistemological Boundaries of Artificial Intelligence in Understanding the Qur’an” (Al-Furqan), Safa Alrumayh (University of Zawia) “critically examines the role of AI in Qur’anic interpretation by addressing its epistemic capabilities, ethical limitations, and claims to interpretive authority. Employing a qualitative, literature-based research design, this study analyzes peer-reviewed… CONTINUE READING

In “OpenITI MAKHZAN: An Open Annotated Dataset of Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu Print and Manuscript Data” (Journal of Open Humanities Data), Jonathan Parkes Allen (University of Maryland) and others introduce OpenITI MAKHZAN, a “large aggregation of Arabic-script ground truth and evaluation data drawn from a wide variety of Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and… CONTINUE READING

In “OpenITI MAKHZAN: An Open Annotated Dataset of Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu Print and Manuscript Data” (Journal of Open Humanities Data), Jonathan Parkes Allen (University of Maryland) and others introduce OpenITI MAKHZAN, a “large aggregation of Arabic-script ground truth and evaluation data drawn from a wide variety of Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and… CONTINUE READING

In “Sacred or Synthetic? Evaluating LLM Reliability and Abstention for Religious Questions” (arXiv), Farah Atif (Mohamed Bin Zayed University of AI) and others “introduce a novel benchmark FiqhQA focused on the LLM generated Islamic rulings explicitly categorized by the four major Sunni schools of thought, in both Arabic and English. Unlike prior work, which either… CONTINUE READING

In “HATFormer: Historic Handwritten Arabic Text Recognition with Transformers” (arXiv), Adrian Chan (independent scholar) and others “propose HATFormer, a transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture that builds on a state-of-the-art English HTR model. By leveraging the transformer’s attention mechanism, HATFormer captures spatial contextual information to address the intrinsic challenges of Arabic script through differentiating cursive characters, decomposing visual… CONTINUE READING

In “The Affective Algorithm: Mapping the Emotional Architecture of Fatimid Geniza Petitions (Part 2)” (Digital Orientalist), Abdulqadir Haidermota (Aljamea-tus-Saifiyah) observes that, “for the historian of the Mediterranean, Geniza documents are rightly celebrated for their detailed preservation of the material world—offering up the price of flax, the lineage of a merchant, or the date of a… CONTINUE READING

In “The Affective Algorithm: Mapping the Emotional Architecture of Fatimid Geniza Petitions (Part 1)” (Digital Orientalist), Abdulqadir Haidermota (Aljamea-tus-Saifiyah) observes that, “for the historian of the Mediterranean, Geniza documents are rightly celebrated for their detailed preservation of the material world—offering up the price of flax, the lineage of a merchant, or the date of a… CONTINUE READING

In “Implementation of a transformer-based question answering model in KutubBot for the Kutubut Tis’ah Hadith Corpus” (EPJ Web of Conferences), Ana Tsalitsatun Ni’mah (Universitas Trunodjoyo Madura) and others “develop an artificial intelligence-based chatbot, called kutubBot, to answer questions related to Kutubut Tis’ah. This system employs a Transformer-based Question Answering approach to comprehend user questions and… CONTINUE READING

In “Between Hadith and Algorithms: The Epistemic Transformation of Farāiḍ by Era Artificial Intelligence” (International Conference on Islam, Law, and Society Proceedings), Mughniatul Ilma (UIN Kiai Ageng Muhammad Besari Ponorogo) and Husna Ni’matul Ulya (UIN Kiai Ageng Muhammad Besari Ponorogo) seek to “reinterpret the relationship between the revocation of knowledge (naz’ al-‘ilm) in hadith and… CONTINUE READING

In “Learning Word Embeddings from Glosses: A Multi-Loss Framework for Arabic Reverse Dictionary Tasks” (Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference), Engy Ibrahim (Alexandria University) and others “address the task of reverse dictionary modeling in Arabic, where the goal is to retrieve a target word given its definition. The task comprises two subtasks:… CONTINUE READING