Artificial Intelligence in Arabic Literary Studies: New Methods for Old Texts
摘要
This research investigates the potential of Artificial Intelligence to bring transformation into Arabic Literary studies. The research focuses on how one can use AI trends the tools supporting it to analyses both classical and modern Arabic texts. Along with Natural Language Processing, machine learning, text mining, and other tools, this research attempts to discover new patterns of linguistic and stylistic devices and hence explores new themes which are not discovered in the analyzed text before. Within this context, the research takes Diwan Al-Mutanabbi and Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz as case studies to both examine the effectiveness of and limitations of AI in capturing new and old patterns of Arabic literary forms. Based on the conducting research, while the use of AI tools in the analysis of literary texts illuminate a range of explicit patterns within the texts, the insufficiency of the AI in capturing implicit and latent patterns which are critical to understand the essence of the story should also be emphasized. Overall, the paper argues that though one can consider AI tools as being powerful to accelerate and automatize the analysis of the text, AI, at the same time, cannot replace the outcome of the analysis of the text which can be made by a human. Hence, enriching the way of its application by connecting with traditional way of analyzing text, which includes the role of humans, could be proposed as a more beneficial approach to cast light to Arab literature. This research also has implications for other interdisciplinary fields where the application of AI linked to Arabic texts should be tailored to special features of Arabic texts.