ArabicaQA: A Comprehensive Dataset for Arabic Question Answering
This addresses the problem of limited Arabic NLP datasets and tools for researchers and developers, representing a foundational but incremental step in the field.
The authors tackled the lack of Arabic NLP resources by creating ArabicaQA, a large-scale dataset with 89,095 answerable and 3,701 unanswerable questions, and introduced AraDPR for Arabic text retrieval, while benchmarking LLMs for Arabic question answering.
In this paper, we address the significant gap in Arabic natural language processing (NLP) resources by introducing ArabicaQA, the first large-scale dataset for machine reading comprehension and open-domain question answering in Arabic. This comprehensive dataset, consisting of 89,095 answerable and 3,701 unanswerable questions created by crowdworkers to look similar to answerable ones, along with additional labels of open-domain questions marks a crucial advancement in Arabic NLP resources. We also present AraDPR, the first dense passage retrieval model trained on the Arabic Wikipedia corpus, specifically designed to tackle the unique challenges of Arabic text retrieval. Furthermore, our study includes extensive benchmarking of large language models (LLMs) for Arabic question answering, critically evaluating their performance in the Arabic language context. In conclusion, ArabicaQA, AraDPR, and the benchmarking of LLMs in Arabic question answering offer significant advancements in the field of Arabic NLP. The dataset and code are publicly accessible for further research https://github.com/DataScienceUIBK/ArabicaQA.