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QARAB: a question answering system to support the Arabic language

Authors:

Hani Abu-Salem,

Steven LytinenAuthors Info & Claims

SEMITIC '02: Proceedings of the ACL-02 workshop on Computational approaches to semitic languages

Pages 1 - 11

https://doi.org/10.3115/1118637.1118644

Published: 11 July 2002 Publication History

Abstract

We describe the design and implementation of a question answering (QA) system called QARAB. It is a system that takes natural language questions expressed in the Arabic language and attempts to provide short answers. The system's primary source of knowledge is a collection of Arabic newspaper text extracted from Al-Raya, a newspaper published in Qatar. During the last few years the information retrieval community has attacked this problem for English using standard IR techniques with only mediocre success. We are tackling this problem for Arabic using traditional Information Retrieval (IR) techniques coupled with a sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach. To identify the answer, we adopt a keyword matching strategy along with matching simple structures extracted from both the question and the candidate documents selected by the IR system. To achieve this goal, we use an existing tagger to identify proper names and other crucial lexical items and build lexical entries for them on the fly. We also carry out an analysis of Arabic question forms and attempt a better understanding of what kinds of answers users find satisfactory. The paucity of studies of real users has limited results in earlier research.

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SEMITIC '02: Proceedings of the ACL-02 workshop on Computational approaches to semitic languages

July 2002

85 pages

Conference Chairs:
Mike Rosner,
Shuly Wintner

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Association for Computational Linguistics

United States

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Published: 11 July 2002

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Overall Acceptance Rate 12 of 21 submissions, 57%

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605550
Balla HLlorens Salvador MDelany S(2022)Arabic Medical Community Question Answering Using ON-LSTM and CNNProceedings of the 2022 14th International Conference on Machine Learning and Computing10.1145/3529836.3529913(298-307)Online publication date: 18-Feb-2022
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Ehaliyagoda RSitbon LBuchanan GStevenson D(2018)A proposed system to increase work readiness of fresh IT graduates at interviewsProceedings of the 30th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/3292147.3292182(443-447)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3292147.3292182
(2017)Question answering systemsInternational Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing10.1504/IJAISC.2017.0842166:1(24-42)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
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Singh JGupta V(2016)Text StemmingACM Computing Surveys10.1145/297560849:3(1-46)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2016
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Azmi AAlshenaifi N(2016)Answering Arabic Why-QuestionsACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/295004935:1(1-19)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2016
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Dwivedi SSingh V(2014)Integrated Question Classification based on Rules and Pattern MatchingProceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Competitive Strategies10.1145/2677855.2677894(1-7)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2014
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Besbes GBaazaoui-Zghal HMoreno A(2013)Ontology-Based Question Analysis MethodProceedings of the 10th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems - Volume 813210.1007/978-3-642-40769-7_9(100-111)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2013
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Sadek JChakkour FMeziane F(2012)Arabic rhetorical relations extraction for answering "why" and "how to" questionsProceedings of the 17th international conference on Applications of Natural Language Processing and Information Systems10.1007/978-3-642-31178-9_52(385-390)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2012
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Abouenour L(2011)On the improvement of passage retrieval in Arabic question/answering (Q/A) systemsProceedings of the 16th international conference on Natural language processing and information systems10.5555/2026011.2026065(336-341)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2011
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