Abstract
The word Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) refers to the body of Islamic law (Shari’ah). A large volume of Fiqh literature has been generated over the past thirteen hundred years, some of which texts have unknown authors. The importance of identifying the Fiqh School emanates from its importance in offering an authenticated interpretation of fundamental sources.
The traditional method for identifying the Fiqh School for a certain text is either by knowledge of the school affiliation the author or by close reading of the text by Fiqh scholars. This method is costly in terms of the time and human effort involved. An alternative to this manual approach is automated identification of Fiqh school texts using stylometric analysis. In this study we investigate the extent to which stylometric features can be used as predictors for Fiqh school authorship of a given text. We explore a corpus of Arabic Fiqh texts using unsupervised cluster analysis and supervised machine learning.
The results of our study show that the Fiqh schools have distinctive text style features that can be used to indicate authorship. The observations from the cluster analysis experiment using a number of different distance measures are visualized using network graphs. The best clustering in terms of Fiqh school division was achieved by the Classic Delta distance measure and Eder’s Delta distance measure. The results from the supervised experiment comparing the four classification algorithms: Support Vector Machines (SVM), Naïve Bayes (NB), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Delta show that supervised classification using SVM produces the highest average accuracy at 97.5% for the task of Fiqh school prediction.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
As of November 2017.
References
Mike, K., Rybicki, J., Eder, M.: Stylometry with R: a package for computational text analysis. The R Journal. 8, 107–121 (2016)
Wrisley, D.J.: Modeling the transmission of al-Mubashshir Ibn Fātik’s Mukhtār al-Ḥikam in medieval europe: some initial data-driven explorations. J. Religion, Media and Digital Culture 5, 228–257 (2016)
Stamatatos, E.: A survey of modern authorship attribution methods. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 60, 538–556 (2009)
Neal, T., Sundararajan, K., Fatima, A., Yan, Y., Xiang, Y., Woodard, D.: Surveying stylometry techniques and applications. ACM Comput. Surv. 50, 86:1–86:36 (2017)
López-Escobedo, F., Solorzano-Soto, J., Martínez, G.S.: Analysis of intertextual distances using multidimensional scaling in the context of authorship attribution. J. Quantitative Linguistics 23, 154–176 (2016)
Rocha, A., et al.: Authorship attribution for social media forensics. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 12, 5–33 (2017)
Afroz, S., Brennan, M., Greenstadt, R.: Detecting Hoaxes, Frauds, and Deception in Writing Style Online. Presented at the May (2012)
Jockers, M.L.: Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. University of Illinois Press, Urbana (2013)
Abooraig, R., Alwajeeh, A., Al-Ayyoub, M., Hmeidi, I.: On the Automatic Categorization of Arabic Articles Based on Their Political Orientation. Presented at the September 22 (2014)
Juola, P.: Authorship attribution. Found. Trends Inf. Retr. 1, 233–334 (2006)
Koppel, M., Akiva, N., Alshech, E., Bar, K.: Automatically classifying documents by ideological and organizational affiliation. In: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics. pp. 176–178. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA (2009)
Estival, D., Gaustad, T., Hutchinson, B., Pham, S.B., Radford, W.: TAT: an author profiling tool with application to Arabic emails. In: Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2007., Melbourne, Australia (2007)
Alsmearat, K., Al-Ayyoub, M., Al-Shalabi, R.: An Extensive Study of the Bag-of-Words Approach for Gender Identification of Arabic Articles. Presented at the November (2014)
R Core Team: R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria (2016)
Almaktabah Alshamela, http://shamela.ws/. Accessed Jan 2018
Data Analysis and Data Mining: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York (2012)
Joachims, T.: Text categorization with support vector machines: learning with many relevant features. In: Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Machine Learning. pp. 137–142. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0026683
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Al-Yahya, M. (2023). Towards Automated Fiqh School Authorship Attribution. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13396. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23793-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23793-5_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-23792-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-23793-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)