Development of a Normalized Hadith Narrator Encyclopedia with TEI

Abstract

The investigation in the narrator list of prophetic tradition (hadith) is considered an important task for different hadith sciences such as the biography of narrators. In fact, the authenticity of hadith is intensely related to the chain of narrators how transmitted the story. In addition, this science is interested essentially in analyzing the hadith narrator profile. Indeed, having a standardized encyclopedia of hadith narrators can help researchers to explore and manipulate the various hadith documents and can simplify different analyzes. For this reason, we aim to develop a standardized hadith narrator encyclopedia with Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) language. To achieve this, we propose a TEI model for the hadith narrator properties. To experiment our TEI model, firstly, we construct a corpus of articles about hadith narrators from Wikipedia. Secondly, we use a system allowing the named entity recognition in relation with narrator data. Thirdly, we perform a post-processing to complete the corpus TEI annotation. Fourthly, we generate the hadith narrator encyclopedia based on our TEI model. The obtained result is encouraging despite some problems related to exceptional cases.