Al-Bayan: An Arabic Question Answering System for the Holy Quran

Abstract

Recently, Question Answering (QA) has been one of the main focus of natural lan-guage processing research. However, Ara-bic Question Answering is still not in the mainstream. The challenges of the Arabic language and the lack of resources have made it difficult to provide Arabic QA sys-tems with high accuracy. While low accu-racies may be accepted for general purpose systems, it is critical in some fields such as religious affairs. Therefore, there is a need for specialized accurate systems that target these critical fields. In this paper, we pro-pose Al-Bayan, a new Arabic QA system specialized for the Holy Quran. The sys-tem accepts an Arabic question about the Quran, retrieves the most relevant Quran verses, then extracts the passage that con-tains the answer from the Quran and its interpretation books (Tafseer). Evaluation results on a collected dataset show that the overall system can achieve 85 % accuracy using the top-3 results. 1