Quran Question Answering System Using Arabic Number Patterns (Singular, Dual, Plural)

Abstract

In the field of Information Retrieval (IR), it may be difficult to answer a question posed by the user, because the search engine retrieves a ranked list of documents that may contain the answer inside the documents, but this needs extra effort from the user to search for the answer inside the documents, and there may be no answer. The alternative to  IR search engine is a question answering system, which retrieves the answer to the question in the natural language text if found. A question answering system accepts the question in natural language, then applies a series of processes to extract the  answer. In general a question answering system is composed of three main components: question classification module, information retrieval module and answer extraction module. We developed a question answering system applied to the Holy Quran written in Classical Arabic. Some characteristics of the Arabic language were used to enhance the answer extraction: one of these important characteristics is number in nouns: singular, dual and plural. A version of the question-answering system was built which uses noun number patterns to process the number in Arabic questions and candidate answers, which enhances the result set of answers by adding more words and meaning. A corpus of questions and its answers about the Holy Quran was used to test and compare baseline and enhanced versions of our Quran Qurstion Answering system.