CLASP
The Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability

Detecting semantic similarity between human-articulated statements and Quranic verses

As the book of religious teachings of Islam, the Quran is frequently cited on many platforms, e.g., on social media, in web sites, and in public speeches or interviews. As such, the Quran has become susceptible to misinterpretation —intentional or otherwise—in human-articulated statements citing Quranic verses. This can also be attributed to the fact that Quranic verses have a high level of linguistic sophistication. For example, metaphors are often used in the Quran, especially as a means for persuasion. In our work, we seek to determine how close a human-articulated statement is to its cited Quranic verse. To this end, we are developing an approach based on the measurement of semantic similarity between any given pair of texts: a human-articulated statement and a verse from what is considered as a gold standard English version of the Quran. Specifically, we are automatically detecting metaphors in the statements, with the aim of assessing whether they are correct translations. As a supporting resource for development and evaluation, we are leveraging a manually annotated corpus consisting of 300 pairs of statements and verses.