Nabil Mosharraf Hossain

arXiv2026

Designing for Interconnected Islamic Learning: A Qualitative Study of Muslim Women's Experiences with Qur'an, Hadith, and Seerah Apps

Islamic learning often depends on reading the Qur'an, Hadith, and Seerah together, yet digital tools typically separate these sources across apps, screens, and search pathways. We examine this as a human-computer interaction problem through five semi-structured interviews with Muslim women recruited from an online Islamic learning community. Participants described a recurring tension: they wanted Qur'an-Hadith-Seerah context at the point of reading, but only when contextual expansion remained trustworthy, optional, and did not interrupt reading. Interpreting the interviews through gendered digital religion, epistemic trust, and seamless learning, we identify five themes concerning contextual understanding, authenticity, interface clutter, study modes, and guidance features. We introduce layered contextuality as an HCI account of this domain: contextual expansion must be balanced with interpretive accountability, devotional flow, and continuity across devices and study intensities.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

cs.AI↗