TafsirExtractor: Text Preprocessing Pipeline preparing Classical Arabic Literature for Machine Learning Applications

AbstractIn this paper, we present a comprehensive tool of preprocessing Classical Arabic (CA) literature in the field of historical exegetical studies for machine learning (ML) evaluations. Most recent ML models require the training data to be in a specific format (e.g. XML, TEI, CoNLL) to use it afterwards for ML applications such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) or Topic Modeling (TM). We report on how our method works and can be applied by other researchers with similar endeavors. Thereby, the importance of this comprehensive tool of preprocessing is demonstrated, as this novel approach has no predecessors for CA yet. We achieve results that enable the training of current ML models leading to state-of-the art performance for NER and TM on CA literature. We make our tool along its source code and data freely available for the Natural Language Processing (NLP) research community.