News

On  March 22, 2021, Ahmet Faruk Çelik (Marmara University) and Taha Emre presented “AI for Comparing and Understanding Ottoman Fatwa Collections.” Fatwa collections are the corpora compiled from Ottoman Shaykhal-Islāms. Today, they are considered as the main reference guide in many disciplines especially by Ottoman History and Ottoman Law. Although there has been a recent interest in academia, there is no standard way to analyze them, in terms of transliteration and translation. Bearing in mind that, most corpora contain more ten thousand fatwas, it is practically impossible to compare corpora between each other. Ahmet Faruk Celik and Taha Emre employed a statistics and machine learning (Natural Language Processing-NLP) based approach to compare fatwas in these two corpora with each other (5 thousand and 12 thousand fatwas, and 60 million comparison) using traditional term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and calculating similarity with cosine distance.