• Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.36-48
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• 2024

The information retrieval (IR) process often encounters a challenge known as query-document vocabulary mismatch, where user queries do not align with document content, impacting search effectiveness. Automatic query expansion (AQE) techniques aim to mitigate this issue by augmenting user queries with related terms or synonyms. Word embedding, particularly Word2Vec, has gained prominence for AQE due to its ability to represent words as real-number vectors. However, AQE methods typically expand individual query terms, potentially leading to query drift if not carefully selected. To address this, researchers propose utilizing median vectors derived from deep median networks to capture query similarity comprehensively. Integrating median vectors into candidate term generation and combining them with the BM25 probabilistic model and two IR strategies (EQE1 and V2Q) yields promising results, outperforming baseline methods in experimental settings.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.281-291
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• 2021

The Islamic jurisprudential legal system represents an essential component of the Islamic religion, that governs many aspects of Muslims' daily lives. This creates many questions that require interpretations by qualified specialists, or Muftis according to the main sources of legislation in Islam. The Islamic jurisprudence is usually classified into branches, according to which the questions can be categorized and classified. Such categorization has many applications in automated question-answering systems, and in manual systems in routing the questions to a specialized Mufti to answer specific topics. In this work we tackle the problem of automatic categorisation of Islamic jurisprudential legal questions using deep learning techniques. In this paper, we build a hierarchical deep learning model that first extracts the question text features at two levels: word and sentence representation, followed by a text classifier that acts upon the question representation. To evaluate our model, we build and release the largest publicly available dataset of Islamic questions and answers, along with their topics, for 52 topic categories. We evaluate different state-of-the art deep learning models, both for word and sentence embeddings, comparing recurrent and transformer-based techniques, and performing extensive ablation studies to show the effect of each model choice. Our hierarchical model is based on pre-trained models, taking advantage of the recent advancement of transfer learning techniques, focused on Arabic language.