Salam all,
Yes I total agree with Mahmoud and Abdul-Baquee, A QA system for the
Quran cannot and will not replace a Fatwa or sheikh.
but What I meant by taking the Data from the www.islam-qa.com and
filtering the answers when we think that the Question and answer are
simple enough to be answered in the form of Quranic verse and this
could serve in the case of a simple QA system for the Quran.
So there is a big job of selecting which question are relevant and are
simple enough to be included in our candidate list of questions.
Since Kais is targeting at the beginning around 1000 simple questions,
I believe that we can use that source as start.
I am ready to help with this and I will start to compile as much simple
QA as possible when I have some time.
Regards,
Wajdi.
Quoting "El-Haj, Mahmoud" <mel...@essex.ac.uk>:
Dear All,
Very impressive indeed.
I just have the following questions, concerns and suggestions
regarding the Quranic Question Answering System.
Building a Quranic Question Answering system is great but you need to
focus on what type of questions are you going to ask!
Is it questions on Belief, juristic, transactions, ...etc.
Trustworthy Resources! What does it exactly mean? Are you intending
to just copy/paste questions and answers from different websites?
Which sounds retrieving process only.
What I mean is training a Quranic QA system with Quranic resources is
different from training a general QA system using a training data, as
the domain is huge and the testing data is different from the
training one.
What Wajdi said about taking all the data from the website he
mentioned and filtering the text in the answer keeping just the Quran
verses sounds same as having the website on different host. The
training here is a matter of matching, as you are only matching
users' questions to even the questions in this website or the answers
as an expanding process.
Providing FATWA answers should be Expert in a way to desist the user
from asking a Sheikh (Mofti). And we know that most of the questions
are being answered based on the Prophet's (Peace Be upon Him) Hadith
and behaviours. Where other factors play a big role also, such as the
situation, place, age, and gender. A QA system in the way of
collecting Correct FATWAS is far away from Quran QAs, as I can't find
the benefit of having the Quran as a source (I mean in the system),
how is the Quran going to be used to answer such kind of questions?
As you said you want an intelligent expert question-answering system.
I suggest that the Quranic QA system should be (as a starting phase)
for answering simple questions as Kais said but questions other than
Fatwas
For example (simple questions such as frequencies and quantities), a
bit advanced questions that requires text analysis and maybe
anaphoric resolution.
e.g.
Q: What kind of birds was Sulaiman (Peace Be upon Him) talking to in
An-Naml Chapter?
A: Hoopoe
Source: "And he took attendance of the birds and said, "Why do I not
see the hoopoe - or is he among the absent?" --> [An-Naml, 20].
Finally, I could imagine one of the following scenarios:
1- An IR system that treats the question as a query and then
retrieves verses that "may" contain the answer in a ranked order.
2- An intelligent QA system that provides non-Quranic answers and
strengthen that by verse(s).
I would be really fascinated by Quranic QA system that can answers
questions as the one mentioned above.
Thanks for your time and please correct me if there is something wrong.
Best wishes,
Mahmoud EL-Haj
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~melhaj/
School Computer Science and Electronic Engineering
Essex University, Wivenhoe Park,
Colchester CO4 3SQ, United Kingdom.
//EASC Corpus: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~melhaj/easc.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: comp-quran-requ...@comp.leeds.ac.uk
[mailto:comp-quran-requ...@comp.leeds.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Kais Dukes
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2010 6:46 PM
To: comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk
Subject: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran
Hello Members of the Computational Quran Mailing List,
Current research in the Quranic Arabic Corpus project involves:
- Morphological annotation
- Syntactic annotation
- Ontology of Quranic Concepts (towards a semantic representation of
the Quran)
As well as extending the morphological and syntactic annotation of the
Quran, I am keen to start thinking about a later stage of this
research. The final (long-term) aim of this project is to build an
intelligent expert question-answering system. An example might be:
==========================
Question:
How long should I breastfeed my child for?
Answer:
"Mothers may breastfeed their children two complete years for whoever
wishes to complete the nursing [period]."
- Source: The Holy Quran, verse (2:233).
==========================
Such a system would allow general website users to ask simple
questions, and get back answers based on facts contained in verses of
the Quran. As a first step to constructing such a system, I am keen to
get hold of a large list of questions (and hopefully answers) backed
by verses of the Quran. I would like to ask the members of this
mailing list advice on building together a list of sample questions
(e.g. several hundred or several thousand questions that people might
commonly ask). Does anybody have any suggestions for online (or other
resources) for Islamic questions and answers, hopefully with all the
answers directly as verses of the Quran?
It would also be great to hear ideas on how a powerful dialog system
of the Quran might approach - or even any ideas about dialog systems
in general.
Looking forward to any responses. Please feel free to reply directly
to the mailing list (just hit reply all).
Kind Regards,
- Kais Dukes
Language Research Group
School of Computing
University of Leeds
http://corpus.quran.com - The Quranic Arabic Corpus
comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk - Computational Quranic Arabic discussion list
----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
