Hi Eric I will be interested in joining in as well. To the list of challenges you may want to refer to complex discourse structure of the Qur'an which was a source of confusion for critical English readers and many as such accused Qur'an to be hopelessly disjoint and a confused jumble. Qur'an 's unique linguistic style which often overrides common grammar rules in terms of grammatical shifts, gender and person disagreement, etc. also adds to this challenge. Moreover, the necessity to link to external knowledge -like hadith and knowledge of the chronogloy of revelation- when understanding a verse also adds to the challenge.
Another aspect which in my view makes Qur'an interesting and a challenging is its nature of being -according to Muslims- Words of God, and Quran challenged the mankind to bring such a text. The challenge thus is: what is the secret embedded in this Qur'an that makes it a challenge to imitate? Is it linguistic? Is it content? or both. To this end, other sophisticated statistical and computational aspects can be considered like the field of 'authorship attribution' and stylometrics. Given that the themes of this grand challenge is limited, I found it a bit tricky to link Qur'anic research to security and terrorism, although this is the nearest match given these four themes. The reason is mainly because the term 'terrorism' has no standard definition to which both west and east would agree. What might be terrorism in the view of US government might not be terrorism in the view of a Quranic scholar and as such this opens the door for personalized understanding of the Qur'an. Nevertheless, we can always restrict our research to the computational linguistic circle with a disclaimer that full understanding of the Qur'an needs more holistic approach beyond just linguistic analysis. Abdul-Baquee M. Sharaf PhD Student Language Technologies Group School of Computing University of Leeds UK ________________________________________ From: comp-quran-requ...@comp.leeds.ac.uk [comp-quran-requ...@comp.leeds.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Eric Atwell [csc...@leeds.ac.uk] Sent: 29 January 2010 14:29 To: Quranic Arabic Corpus discussion Subject: Grand Challenge in Computing Research UKCRC, The UK Computing Research Committee, have asked for "Grand Challenges in Computing Research for 2010 and beyond" http://www.ukcrc.org.uk/grand-challenge/2010.cfm This will help UK research funding agencies to plan ahead. They invite a 2-page proposal by 8th February, for a workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 16th April 2010. I'd like to propose: Understanding the Quran - a new Grand Challenge for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence - see draft at http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric/UnderstandingTheQuran.doc The proposal has to relate to "major societal grand challenges"; for the purposes of this meeting they have picked four challenges on which to focus, namely - climate change, assisted living, security and health. My draft proposal on "Understanding the Quran" tries to fit this focus by highlighting security-related applications; but of course an online Quran Expert will have many other uses too. I hope others on the comp-quran discussion list will support this proposal. If you would like to be named as a joint proposer, please email me <e...@comp.leeds.ac.uk> to confirm: your NAME, and AFFLIATION - department/school and university Thanks in advance for your support. -- Eric Atwell, Senior Lecturer, Language research group, School of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS, Leeds LS2 9JT, England TEL: 0113-3435430 FAX: 0113-3435468 WWW/email: google Eric Atwell
