Survey of Semantic Islamic Search Systems

Abstract

A semantic search is a state-of-the-art approach that significantly improves search results since it considers the relationships between the words and the domain concepts rather than only relying on exact word matches. It is clear from the literature that works in semantic search in English are significantly developed compared to Arabic. This paper will highlight the search models focusing on the semantic approaches that leverage the ontology as a knowledge resource. Then, it will narrow the scope to explore the existing Islamic semantic search models to address their limitations and point to possible future directions. As a result of this survey, we notice a severe deficiency in the available resources that interlink varied Islamic sources, such as Quraan and Hadith, and the tools that extract domain-specific concepts. Thus, in the future, a researcher should focus on filling this gap and introducing a public gold standard resource to cover Islamic topics comprehensively for developing Islamic NLP research.