Hyper rectangular trend analysis application to Islamic rulings (fatwas)

Trend analysis is a research field with a large number of applications ranging from monitoring potential rivals to analyzing interests of a certain category of people. Applying trend analysis to the Islamic domain makes it possible to have a general idea about topics discussed by Muslims all over the world. It helps both scholars and social science researchers understanding the needs and the interest domains of each Muslim society. In this paper, we present a trend analysis method based on hyper-concepts. Hyper-concepts make it possible to decompose any corpus into non-overlapping rectangular relations and to highlight the most representative attributes or keywords. We illustrate the effectiveness of our method in identifying relevant keywords related to the Islamic context and we show how to use our method for identifying trending topics with respect to time.