Using Arabic Numbers (Singular, Dual, and Plurals) Patterns To Enhance Question Answering System Results

In the field of information retrieval, it is very difficult to answer the question entered by the user, because the search engine retrieve a ranked documents that contain any key word or phrase inside the documents, this need another extra effort to search the answer inside the documents, and there may be no answer. The alternative of search engine is a question answering system, which it retrieves the exact answer of the question in the natural language if found. A question answering system accepts the question in the natural, then many processes were done to extract the exact answer. In general a question answering system is composed of three main components: question classification module, information retrieval module and answer extraction module. A question answering system is applied in holy Quran which written and cited in Arabic language, some characteristic of the Arabic language were used to enhance the answer extraction, one of these important characteristics is numbering, singular, dual and plural. A prototype build uses special pattern used to process the number in Arabic language, which enhance the answers by adding more words and meaning. A corpus of questions and its answers from holy Quran used to test and answers the question

Effectiveness of query expansion in searching the Holy Quran

Modern Arabic text is written without diacritical marks (short vowels), which causes considerable ambiguity at the word level in the absence of context. Exceptional from this is the Holy Quran, which is endorsed with short vowels and other marks to preserve the pronunciation and hence, the correctness of sensing its words. Searching for a word in vowelized text requires typing and matching all its diacritical marks, which is cumbersome and preventing learners from searching and understanding the text. The other way around, is to ignore these marks and fall in the problem of ambiguity. In this paper, we provide a novel diacritic-less searching approach to retrieve from the Quran relevant verses that match a user’s query through automatic query expansion techniques. The proposed approach utilizes a relational database search engine that is scalable, portable across RDBMS platforms, and provides fast and sophisticated retrieval. The results are presented and the applied approach reveals future directions for search engines

Arabic Cooperative Answer Generation via Wikipedia Article Infoboxes

[EN] The typical question-answering system is facing many challenges related to the processing of questions and information resources in the extraction and generation of adequate answers. These challenges increase when the requested answer is cooperative and its language is Arabic. In this paper, we propose an original approach to generate cooperative answers for user-definitional questions designed to be integrated in a question-answering system. This approach is mainly based on the exploitation of the semi-structured Web knowledge which consists in using features derived from Wikipedia article infoboxes to generate cooperative answers. It is globally independent of a particular language, which gives it the ability to be integrated in any definitional question-answering system. We have chosen to integrate and experiment it in a definitional question-answering system dealing with the Arabic language entitled DefArabicQA. The results showed that this system has a significant impact on the approach efficiency regarding the improvement of the quality of the answer.The work of the third author was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) under the SomEMBED research project (TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P) and by the Generalitat Valenciana under the grant ALMAMATER (PrometeoII/2014/030).Trigui, O.; Belguith, L.; Rosso, P. (2017). Arabic Cooperative Answer Generation via Wikipedia Article Infoboxes. Research in Computing Science. 132:129-153. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/103731S12915313

Extraction of Arabic word roots: An Approach Based on Computational Model and Multi-Backpropagation Neural Networks

Stemming is a process of extracting the root of a given word, by stripping off the affixes attached to this word. Many attempts have been made to address the stemming of Arabic words problem. The majority of the existing Arabic stemming algorithms require a complete set of morphological rules and large vocabulary lookup tables. Furthermore, many of them give more than one potential stem or root for a given Arabic word. According to Ahmad [11], the Arabic stemming process based on the language morphological rules is still a very difficult task due to the nature of the language itself. The limitations of the current Arabic stemming methods have motivated this research in which we investigate a novel approach to extract the word roots of Arabic language named here as MUAIDI-STEMMER 2. This approach attempts to exploit numerical relations between Arabic letters, avoiding having a list of the root and pattern of each word in the language, and giving one root solution. This approach is composed of two phases. Phase I depends on a basic calculations extracted from linguistic analysis of Arabic patterns and affixes. Phase II is based on artificial neural network trained by backpropagation learning rule. In this proposed phase, we formulate the root extraction problem as a classification problem and the neural network as a classifier tool. This study demonstrates that a neural network can be effectively used to ex- tract the word roots of Arabic language The stemmer developed is tested using 46,895 Arabic word types3. Error counting accuracy evaluation was employed to evaluate the performance of the stemmer. It was successful in producing the stems of 44,107 Arabic words from the given test datasets with accuracy of 94.81%. 2.Muaidi is the author father's name. 3.Types mean distinct or unique words