Summary

I am a PhD student in the School of Computing @ Leeds University. I am part of the Natural Language Processing group and my supervisor is Dr. Eric Atwell . Before that I had my MSc in Computer Science from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals.

Research

My research is on Text Mining the Quran. In particular, I am looking into the problem of linking two semantically related verses. As a upper bound human tagged gold standard, I have created a dataset of related verses taken from Tafsir Ibn Kathir. You can test this dataset at here along with a wiki page for describing this task.

In addition, I have been working towards annotating Quranic pronoun antecedence and maintaining a list of concepts out of these antecedents. You can query this dataset here or read more about this dataset at this wiki page , you may also download the annotated corpus from the previous wiki link, for research purposes only.

Visit TextMiningTheQuran.Com for more information.

Publications

• Sharaf,Abdul-Baquee and Atwell, Eric. (2012) "QurSim: A corpus for evaluation of relatedness in short texts", LREC 2012. [ PDF ]
• Sharaf, Abdul-Baquee and Atwell, Eric, (2012) "QurAna: corpus of the Quran annotated with pronominal anaphora", LREC 2012. [ PDF ]
• Sharaf, Abdul-Baquee; Atwell, Eric (2011)التصنيف الآلي للسور القرآنية "Automatic categorization of the Quranic chapters". 7th International Computing Conference in Arabic (ICCA11).31th May - 2nd June 2011, Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud University, Riyadh, KSA. IN ARABIC [ Paper | Poster ]
• Sharaf, A. et al (2010). "NLP Projects on Arabic and the Quran at Leeds University". Workshop on enriching Arabic digital contents. Damascus, Syria. Paper | Presentation
• Dukes, K. Sharaf, A and Atwell, E (2010). "Online Visualization of Traditional Quranic Grammar using Dependency Graphs." Conference on The Foundations of Arab Linguistics - Sibawayhi and the Earliest Arabic Grammatical Theory, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge University.|Abstract
• Dukes, K., Atwell, E., Sharaf, A. (2010) Syntactic Annotation Guidelines for the Quranic Arabic Dependency Treebank. LREC-2010, Valletta, Malta.Paper| Poster
• Eric Atwell, Kais Dukes, Abdul-Baquee Sharaf, Nizar Habash, et al.(2010) Understanding the Quran: A new Grand Challenge for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Grand Challenges for Computing Research (2010). British Computer Society Workshop. Edinburgh. PDF
• Sharaf, A. and Atwell, E. (2009) A Corpus-based computational model for knowledge representation of the Qur'an. 5th Corpus Linguistics Conference, Liverpool. PDF

Reports

• First year transfer Report (Dec. 2009) [PDF]

Presentations

• Sharaf, Abdul-Baquee. " Computational Quranic Linguistics at Leeds University". Invited Talk. Umm-al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. May 23rd, 2011. [ PDF ]
• A Corpus-based computational model for knowledge representation of the Qur'an. 5th Corpus Linguistics Conference, Liverpool (July 2009) [PDF]
• Here is a YouTube video of a summary of Text Mining Quran. 2012
• Quran and Computational Linguistics. NLP group seminar, Leeds, 2009.
• Text Similarity, NLP Seminar at Leeds, Feb. 2010.