Development and Evaluation of a Web Based Question Answering System for Arabic Language

Abstract

Question Answering (QA) systems are gaining great importance due to the increasing amount of web content and the high demand for digital information that regular information retrieval techniques cannot satisfy. A question answering system enables users to have a natural language dialog with the machine, which is required for virtually all emerging online service systems on the Internet. The need for such systems is higher in the context of the Arabic language. This is because of the scarcity of Arabic QA systems, which can be attributed to the great challenges they present to the research community,including theparticularities of Arabic, such as short vowels, absence of capital letters, complex morphology, etc. In this paper, we report the design and implementation of an Arabic web-based question answering system,which we called “JAWEB”, the Arabic word for the verb “answer”. Unlike all Arabic questionanswering systems, JAWEB is a web-based application,so it can be accessed at any time and from anywhere. Evaluating JAWEBshowed that it gives the correct answer with 100% recall and 80% precision on average. When comparedto ask.com, the well-established web-based QA system, JAWEBprovided 1520% higher recall.These promising results give clear evidence that JAWEB has great potential as a QA platform and is much needed by Arabic-speaking Internet users across the world.