A Discourse-Based Approach for Arabic Question Answering

The treatment of complex questions with explanatory answers involves searching for arguments in texts. Because of the prominent role that discourse relations play in reflecting text producers’ intentions, capturing the underlying structure of text constitutes a good instructor in this issue. From our extensive review, a system for automatic discourse analysis that creates full rhetorical structures in large-scale Arabic texts is currently unavailable. This is due to the high computational complexity involved in processing a large number of hypothesized relations associated with large texts. Therefore, more practical approaches should be investigated. This article presents a new Arabic Text Parser oriented for question-answering systems dealing with لماذا “why” and كيف “how to” questions. The Text Parser presented here considers the sentence as the basic unit of text and incorporates a set of heuristics to avoid computational explosion. With this approach, the developed question-answering system reached a significant improvement over the baseline with a Recall of 68% and MRR of 0.62.