Extracting Knowledge from the Bible: A Comparison between the Old and the New Testament

摘要

The objective of this work is to present a comparison between the Old Testament and the New Testament in terms of knowledge extraction and ontology learning. It is a knows fact that these two books have many differences in term of size, practice of worship, prophecy and there is also a difference in the time period when they were written. By applying the ontology learning and knowledge extraction methods we were interested do see if these differences are revealed and what are the similarities among them. Ontology learning can be applied for the semantic analysis of text, in order to extract concepts, relations, which can be further used for automated summaries or critical comparison. Such activities are important in education as they can allow dynamic creation of content or analyses that can be further used in the educational process. Since ontology-learning methods require large corpus of unstructured data, we have chosen the Bible as source for the text. In this way, the new developed methods are validated, and they can be used successfully in other educational domains. The Bible is the religious text of Christians and Jews. The Bible contains a collection of scriptures that was written by many authors, at different time and locations. Computationally, the Bible contains semi-structured information due to its organized structure of scriptures and numbered chapters. We have used Text2Onto as the main tool in order to obtain the most relevant concepts from the New Testament and then from The Old Testament. After that we analyze the most relevant concepts and the range of similarity for each domain identified in the New Testament and in The Old Testament. We can mention that there are no studies reported in the literature using ontology extraction for this religious domain. Those methods can be employed for automatic generation of content that can be further used in the educational process.