The Study on Qur'anic surahs' Structured-ness and their Order Organization Using NLP Techniques

چکیده

The study of surahs' structure has attracted researchers' attention in recent years. One of the theories herein is the theory of Topic Sameness which acknowledges that each surah of Quran has formed on a single topic. The theory of Introduction and Explanation as one of the most important branches of Topic Sameness, proposes that the Almighty states the topic of each surah at the first section, elaborates it at different parts of the surah in the forms such as stories, signals of nature, and future predictions, and concludes from the stated contents at the final part. In this paper, we accordingly intend to study the two theories using NLP techniques for the first time. In this regard, based on the three methods of tf-idf, word2vec and roots' accompaniment in verses, the similarity of Quranic roots is computed. Then, the amount of similarity of the concepts within surahs to each other is calculated and compared with the random mode. The results show that the studied surahs hold the inner coherence between the concepts so that they have been formed on a single topic or a few topics related to each other. In addition, the study on the similarity between the first and the body sections of each surah shows that the structure of Introduction and Explanation seems to be true for many surahs by the designed methodology. At the end, by comparing the similarity of surahs to each other versus their order distance in Quran and their revelation time distance, we realized that the whole Quran is also relatively organized in terms of surah' ordering.