Question Expansion Technique On The Different Translations Of The Holy Quran By Using WordNet And Islamic Synonyms

The Holy Quran is the most significant religious text, which is followed by the believers of the Islamic religion. The translations of the Quran are the interpretation of its meaning in different languages, to assist those who are not familiar with the Arabic language.Most of the Quranic search systems that support the needs of who are non-native speakers of the Arabic language of the contents of the Holy Quran are based on keywords matching. Since there are several known English translations of the Holy Quran and each translation has its terminology based on the style of the translator. In addition to that, there are Islamic terms might be not used in the English language, such as "Hajj" or "Saum," where these terms might vary from one translation to another. Therefore, these search systems do not support the needs of the user, and often there is no matching between the terms of user's question and the terms of the Quran. Consequently, this research has used the synonyms of WordNet to expand the user's question, and to cover all the possibilities of the terms that might be used in the Quran translation, but there are many of Islamic terms are not available in the WordNet database. The WordNet has been enhanced with a set of Islamic synonyms that have been used in the well-known Islamic translations of the English language, which it was created by the researcher, to increase the likelihood of providing a sure matching between the question's words and the contents of the Quran translation. According to the results of this study, the evaluation of this research proved that the method of question expansion by using the both of the WordNet and the Islamic synonyms showed better accuracy and efficiency than the traditional keywords matching systems, or the system that uses only the WordNet synonyms in the question expansion method in terms of matching all user's questions words with docu