Quranic search engine

main goal

building a search engine on the Quran that allows us to:

• find specific verses even if the search word's pronounes are incorrect.
• find all verses about a specific concept.
• collect acattered quranic stories together.
• allow both Arabic and English search.

Cleaning The Data

• usual issues with text data (removing numbers, punctuation, diacritics ...)
  • re package was used to deal with this problem.
• Basmalah issue:
  • at the arabic version there was an extra basmalah attached to each first verse in each chapter.
    while the english version has no extra basmalah's.
    • so I removed the extra basmalahs and added a basmalah before the first verse in each chapter with verse number = 0

EDAs

• mainly I compared between makki chapters and madani chapters.

Search engine

to achive the goals mentioned above we need to:

• stem each verse and stem the search word befor searching
  • The Arabic version was stemmed by Farasa stemmer.
  • The English version was stemmed by nltk stemmer namly PorterStemmer
• tag all verses discussing a specific concept by a tag, then search by tag to get all these verses.
  • almost manually, firstly by names. For example, if the verse contains "messiah", "son of mary" or "jesus" it will be tagged by "jesus".
  • another approach is to look up (either by graping a quran or otherwise) what verses are discussing Moses stories (for example), note them and then tag them.

The Data

There are 2 data files, one is the arabic Quran
and the other one is an English translated version of the Quran.

each data file has three important features:
1- The number of the chapter (Surah).
2- The number of the verse (Ayah) within the chapter.
3- the verse either in Arabic or in english.

dara sources

1. The Arabic Data:
   Tanzil Quran Text (Simple, Version 1.1)
   Copyright (C) 2007-2022 Tanzil Project
   License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
   This copy of the Quran text is carefully produced, highly
   verified and continuously monitored by a group of specialists
   at Tanzil Project.
   Please check updates at: http://tanzil.net/updates/

2. English transelation version:
   Saheeh International translation from
   https://quranenc.com/en/browse/english_saheeh