Abstract
This research article presents the work that is related to the application of different machine learning based similarity techniques on religious text for identifying similarities and differences among its various translations. The dataset includes 10 different English translations of verses (Arabic: Ayah) of two Surahs (chapters) namely, Al-Humazah and An-Nasr. The quantitative similarity values for different translations for the same verse were calculated by using the cosine similarity and semantic similarity. The corpus went through two series of experiments: before pre-processing and after pre-processing. In order to determine the performance of machine learning based similarities, human annotated similarities between translations of two Surahs (chapters) namely Al-Humazah and An-Nasr were recorded to construct the ground truth. The average difference between the human annotated similarity and the cosine similarity for Surah (chapter) Al-Humazah was found to be 1.38 per verse (ayah) per pair of translation. After pre-processing, the average difference increased to 2.24. Moreover, the average difference between human annotated similarity and semantic similarity for Surah (chapter) Al-Humazah was found to be 0.09 per verse (Ayah) per pair of translation. After pre-processing, it increased to 0.78. For the Surah (chapter) An-Nasr, before preprocessing, the average difference between human annotated similarity and cosine similarity was found to be 1.93 per verse (Ayah), per pair of translation. And. After pre-processing, the average difference further increased to 2.47. The average difference between the human annotated similarity and the semantic similarity for Surah An-Nasr before preprocessing was found to be 0.93 and after pre-processing, it was reduced to 0.87 per verse (ayah) per pair of translation. The results showed that as expected, the semantic similarity was proven to be better measurement indicator for calculation of the word meaning.