Linking Hadith Narrator Identities Across Heterogeneous Arabic Biographical Databases: A Multi-Signal Entity Resolution Pipeline
This study addresses the challenge of identity linkage among hundreds of thousands of Islamic hadith transmitters across heterogeneous Arabic biographical databases, where the absence of unified identifiers impedes cross-resource integration. To resolve this, the work proposes the first cross-database, multi-signal entity resolution framework tailored for Arabic hadith transmitters. The approach employs a two-stage pipeline: first linking transmitters from the Sanadset corpus to the HadithTransmitters database via name similarity, then aligning with the MuslimScholars database through a weighted fusion of multiple signals—namely name, death year, and reliability rating—augmented by a transitive linking strategy. Operating without metadata, the framework achieves high-coverage identity resolution, constructing a directed transmission graph comprising 185,216 nodes and 814,093 edges. This effort yields the first structured integration of these three major resources, accompanied by the public release of high-quality linked corpora and a cross-source biographical knowledge graph.