Arabic Question Answering: A Study on Challenges, Systems, and Techniques

TLDR: A review of the Arabic Question Answering Systems building processes and the challenges met by the researchers in this topic due to the Arabic language special characteristics are provided.

Abstract: The enormous increase of the amount of information available on the web creates the need for systems like Question Answering to bridge the gap between general end users and the web with its different data representations. A considerable portion of the available data on the web is written in Arabic for and by Arabic users. This paper provides a review of the Arabic Question Answering Systems building processes and the challenges met by the researchers in this topic due to the Arabic language special characteristics. A general architecture is represented for the Question Answering task on both structured and unstructured data. Then, an overview of the work done in Arabic Question Answering Systems is presented. Finally, a number of tools and linguistic resources are recommended for researchers to develop Arabic question answering systems. General Terms Question Answering, Question Answering Systems, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval