Answer Extraction for Why Arabic Questions Answering Systems: EWAQ
This addresses the lack of Arabic question answering systems, particularly for 'why' questions, but is incremental as it applies an existing method (entailment) to a specific language and question type.
The paper tackles the problem of extracting answers to 'why' questions in Arabic by developing a question answering system called EWAQ that uses entailment metrics to re-rank passages from search engines, resulting in increased accuracy compared to existing web-based systems.
With the increasing amount of web information, questions answering systems becomes very important to allow users to access to direct answers for their requests. This paper presents an Arabic Questions Answering Systems based on entailment metrics. The type of questions which this paper focuses on is why questions. There are many reasons lead us to develop this system: generally, the lack of Arabic Questions Answering Systems and scarcity Arabic Questions Answering Systems which focus on why questions. The goal of the proposed system in this research is to extract answers from re-ranked retrieved passages which are retrieved by search engines. This system extracts the answer only to why questions. This system is called by EWAQ: Entailment based Why Arabic Questions Answering. Each answer is scored with entailment metrics and ranked according to their scores in order to determine the most possible correct answer. EWAQ is compared with search engines: yahoo, google and ask.com, the well-established web-based Questions Answering systems, using manual test set. In EWAQ experiments, it is showed that the accuracy is increased by implementing the textual entailment in re-raking the retrieved relevant passages by search engines and deciding the correct answer. The obtained results show that using entailment based similarity can help significantly to tackle the why Answer Extraction module in Arabic language.