Prediction of date and ideology of old Islamic documents

Abstract

Prediction of date and Ideology (aka Islamic school or Madhab) is a very important research field. It allows scholars and researchers to find out more about what is specific to a particular period of time and what the main topics of interest were during each period. It also makes it possible to see how each Islamic school differs from others. In this paper, we describe a new system for date and Islamic school prediction for one single page of text. Our method extracts the keywords using the hyper concept algorithm which outputs the keywords in a structured tree based on their importance. The keywords are then fed to a classification algorithm which predicts both the date and the Islamic school associated to each document. Experiments have been conducted on a large database crawled from Shamela online library. The results show that date prediction can be done with a root mean square error of about 200 years. Moreover, we study how the error varies with respect to the time period. This study is the first in its kind that gives a global overview of the Islamic jurisprudence heritage.