Toward a computer study of the reliability of Arabic stories

  • Authors:
  • Ibrahim Bounhas;Bilel Elayeb;Fabrice Evrard;Yahya Slimani

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences of Tunis, University of Tunis, 1060 Tunis, Tunisia;RIADI-GDL Research Laboratory, The National School of Computer Sciences (ENSI), 2010 Manouba, Tunisia and the Computer Science Research Institute of Toulouse (IRIT), 02 Rue Camichel, 31071 Toulous ...;The Computer Science Research Institute of Toulouse (IRIT), 02 Rue Camichel, 31071 Toulouse, France;Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences of Tunis, University of Tunis, 1060 Tunis, Tunisia

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The Arabic storytelling methodology provides solutions to the problem of information reliability. The reliability of a story depends on the credibility of its narrators. To insure reliability verification, the narrators' names are explicitly cited at the head of the story, which constitute its chain of narrators. Stories were reported from a generation to another to insure the reliable transmission of historical knowledge. We present a set of tools based on the Arabic storytelling methodology. We start by presenting this methodology as a set of principles for information-reliability assessment. Then, we detail an architecture designed to support the study of the reliability of Arabic stories. Indeed, we developed grammars for parsing Arabic full names and chains of narrators of Arabic stories. After that, an intelligent identity recognizer links names found in chains of narrators to the biographies of the corresponding persons. We model this step as a possibilistic information retrieval task. Finally, chains are analyzed through metadata available in biographies to help the user identify sources of unreliability. We propose to identify the class of reliability of a story with a possibilistic classifier. The achieved results in named entity and identity recognition were satisfactory and confirm to the targets set for the precision, recall, and F-measure metrics. The developed tools also are reusable components that can be used to study the reliability of other types of Arabic texts. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.