Searching and retrieving information from the Holy Quran has recently received special attention by Muslim and Arab researchers. Many applications and websites offered to perform search through the Quran using keywords, semantic search, or even both. Arabic; as the language of the Quran, is having a complex structure and thus the searching process of Arabic scripts is rather more difficult than English. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach; using a combination of syntactic (keyword) and word semantics, to search through the Quran text. The Quran text was pre-processed and represented in a XML format. A system was implemented using Python where the concept of regular expressions is used to test the approach with a Graphical User Interface used to manipulate user requests. Good and promising results from the approach were obtained.
Key words: Arabic NLP, IR, Quran, Keyword search, Semantic search
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