The application of distributional semantics in the Qur'an, a case study of the root-word

Articles in Press

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Authors
A. zouelm 1
N. Nilsaz 2
1 Ph.D. Student in Sciences of Qur’an and Hadith, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
2 Associate Professor, Department of Sciences of Qur’an and Hadith, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Distributional semantics is a neo-constructuralist method that focuses on the use of words in real texts to understand the approximate meaning of a word, compared to other words. Since one of the goals of applying semantics in Quran, is to know the meaning of words according to practical context, the use of this method in Quran becomes important. In this research, in order to introduce the application of distributional semantics in the Qur'an, with the descriptive-analytical method, the steps of implementing, the challenges and solutions to overcome it, have been explained by examining a case study.The steps are: determining some words to compare with the main word, determining distributional features (surah, equivalent to document, and phrase), linguistic pre-processing of the Qur'anic text and removal of stopwords, forming context vector and co-occurrence matrix and weighting its elements, finding semantic similarity of words and its analysis. The most important challenges of using this method in Qur'an are the small volume of the Qur'anic text, the lack of suitable software for calculations in Quran, and the great difference in the length of surahs in the word-document pattern. Paying more attention to the basis of the distributional method (distributional hypothesis), not using this method for very low-frequency words, and comparing the results obtained from the word-document and word-phrase patterns are solutions to overcome some challenges. For the root-word Farah, it is obtained that the meaning from the Qur'anic context (close to the meaning of pride) is different from the meaning mentioned in dictionaries (joy).

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Subjects

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Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 13 July 2025