Oxford Summer School 2025

Amina El Ganadi, ITSERR researcher, presented the paper “Reimagining Islamic Knowledge Classification: Evaluating Culturally Adaptive LLMs for Arabic-Script Libraries” at The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2025. Her contribution examined how ChatGPT can support the categorisation of an Islamic digital library by leveraging incremental Machine Learning and Transfer Learning techniques, highlighting the model’s notable familiarity with Islamic knowledge and its ability to organise subjects hierarchically, from Qur’anic Studies to Modern Islamic Thought. At the same time, the paper discussed key challenges that emerged in this context – in particular issues of interpretability, generalisation, and hallucination – which remain crucial obstacles for the reliable use of large language models in Arabic-script library environments.