Question Processing for Arabic Question Answering System

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Date
2015-05
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Publisher
The British University in Dubai (BUiD)
Abstract
Due to very fast growth of information in the last few decades, getting precise information in real time is becoming increasingly difficult. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo are helping in finding the information but the information provided by them are in the form of documents which consumes a lot of time of the user. Question Answering Systems have emerged as a good alternative to search engines where they produce the desired information in a very precise way in the real time. This saves a lot of time for the user. Question Answering systems are offered with the questions of natural language and proposed output is either the suitable answer recognized in a text or small text crumbs including the answer. There has been a lot of research in the field of English and some European language Question Answering Systems. However, Arabic Question Answering Systems could not match the pace due to some inherent difficulties with the language itself as well as due to lack of tools available to assist the researchers. Therefore, in this dissertation, we will take the challenge to design and develop some modules of Arabic Question Answering Systems. The task of Question Answering can be divided into three phases; Question Analysis, Document Analysis, and Answer Analysis. The part that our dissertation concern is the first phase, i.e., the Question Analysis phase. The question analysis phase consists of two major tasks namely Question Classification and Query Expansion beside other minor tasks such as stop word removal, Part of Speech tagging etc. We have proposed methods to accomplish these two major tasks in Question Analysis phase. We have used Nooj and Arabic WordNet (AWN) to implement our methods. In order to evaluate the performances of the proposed methods, we have used the corpus in Arabic language developed by Y.Benajiba which is available at http://users.dsic.upv.es/~ybenajiba/.
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Keywords
Arabic question answering systems, Arabic language, search engines
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