FOREWARD and CONTENTS

Abstract

Foreword By the grace of Allah, it is a great pleasure to introduce this issue of: The International Journal on Islamic Applications in Computer Science and Technology With the beginning of the 11th year of the publication of this Journal, this issue is the 41st of this journal. We thank Allah for enabling us to continue all through these years. With the wide specialization of this Journal, it attracted contributions from researchers from all over the world. We pray to Allah to put his “Baraka” in the contents of the Journal and spread the fruits of its contents in the future. This issue contains four papers. The first one is entitled: Using Automatic Question Generation Web Services Tools to Build a Quran Question-and-Answer Dataset. Since there is a lack of a Quran question-and-answer corpus, this research paper aimed to create a valuable dataset for the research community using automatic question generation models. All the tools were reviewed as black boxes, not as computational linguistics algorithms, compared them, and explored their features and drawbacks. We then identified freely available tools, which are the Explore AI Question Generation demo, the Cathoven Question Generator, the Questgen Question Generator, and the Lumos Learning Question Generator. Lastly, a corpus of Quran questions and answers is created using these web service tools. This experiment indicates that these tools’ performance varies in terms of many criteria, both the tools’ performance in general and in terms of specific standards that measure the quality of the generated questions and answers. The Cathoven Question Generator was found to be the best tool in terms of general performance. Using these tools, we generated 40,585 questions and answers based on the English translation of the Quran. The second paper is entitled: Stylometric Authentication of an Uncredible Extra-Hadith Collection In this paper, a survey on the stylometric authentication of an uncredible extra-dataset claimed to be a part of the Hadith, but for which religious scholars showed that it was probably not (i.e., fabricated or weak collection). The extra-Hadith collection is analyzed and compared to the genuine certified Hadith book of Bukhari. For that purpose, we present a stylometric approach based on the author style of the Matn (i.e., pure speech of the Prophet - Pbuh) Two experiments were conducted and commented: the first experiment is an authorship attribution on 19 text segments; and the second experiment is an automatic document clustering on 15 text segments. In the first experiment, we used character 4-grams and the nearest neighbor classification technique with Manhattan distance. In the 2nd experiment, a Hierarchical Clustering with Manhattan distance and Spearman distance was used. The results of both classification and clustering experiments show a difference in author style between the uncredible extra-Hadith collection (or at least a main part of it) and the genuine Bukhari Hadith. Although the authentication technique is made here at the subset level (i.e., text subsets of about 500 words each), the obtained results give a scientific agreement to the Islamic religious scholars about their evaluation on the doubtful collection: the uncredible collection, or at least a main part of it, does not have the same author style as the genuine Hadith one. The third paper is entitled: Islamic Ontology Coverage Evaluation In this work, the data-driven evaluation method is applied to evaluate the adequacy of the available Quranic Ontologies, namely QuranOntology and Qurany, in covering the topical concepts for one of the Islam pillars, particularly the Hajj domain. The results show that the existing ontologies do not deeply cover Islamic topics. In addition, the QuranOntology concepts coverage represents 1% precision related to Hajj terminology. On the other hand, only 14 out of 160 Hajj keywords are matched with the ontology concepts, representing approximately a recall of 8.75 %. Therefore, there is a strong need to build knowledge resources that enrich the coverage of Islamic topics. The fourth paper is entitled: Decolonising the reading lists of Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies The purpose of this study is to examine and compare diversity of author ethnicity in the two universities’ reading list. Moreover, this work investigates the claim that "Western authors dominate the university curricula". The analysis of reading lists of Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Leeds shows evidence of ethnicity bias – supporting the claim. In this study, we present an initial analysis of undergoing PhD research. Several questions remain to be answered regarding the students' and lecturers' perspectives on reading lists and their understanding of diversity and decolonising the curriculum, which will be investigated in future research