Re: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran

2010-02-27 Thread Bayan Shawar

Salam Kais,
  in fact we will face one important problem: not all these answers are right, 
so we could not trust any website, we should be sure who sent the fatwa. I 
found some QA, but i am sure not all answers are right, i read some and i found 
it nonsense.
You can have a look at:
http://www.godsmosque.org/topten.htm

But do not trust the answers source, some answers are totally not right in my 
opinion.

Or we may collect the QA then we show it to a scholar to select he correct ones.


I will try to find more,
Best wsihes,
Bayan
--- On Sat, 27/2/10, Kais Dukes dukes.k...@googlemail.com wrote:

 From: Kais Dukes dukes.k...@googlemail.com
 Subject: Re: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran
 To: Bayan Shawar bsha...@yahoo.com
 Cc: comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk
 Date: Saturday, 27 February, 2010, 21:25
 Hello Bayan,
 
 I think this sounds very exciting and interesting. As a
 first step, I
 would like to discuss how we can put together a list of
 questions (and
 hopefully answers) related to the Quran, ideally with each
 entry in
 the list linked to a specific verse which contains the
 answer. You
 mentioned Islamway.com - I wonder if you (or others) are
 aware of any
 online sources for questions and answers as well as this,
 that we
 could use to compile the QA knowledge base?
 
 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
 
  On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 7:16 PM, Bayan Shawar bsha...@yahoo.com
 wrote:
  Dear Kais,
   This will be agreat idea, i may help you in this. I
 used the Qur'an before to train the chatbot. I took all
 verses in arabic and English. However the idea was not as
 the one you suggested because my database was only the
 qur'an without interpretation. So when you ask a question
 about Islam, an answer would be obtained from the Qur'an
 verse, so the answer is the verse that match least frequent
 words.
 
  At that time i used some of Islamin questions obtained
 from ISlamway.com, and other islamic sites. Then i asked
 muslims and non muslims to evalute if the answeres obtained
 were related, partially related or non.
 
  Now, are you goinf to use the English version of the
 Qur'an as the sourse of your answer, or as i understood we
 would like to obtain an answer as you mentioned then we
 could refer the user to verse number and soora in Qur'an. In
 this cae in additin to questions, what will be your databse:
 is it a structure database as QA as the one found in TREC.
 Just if you could provide me with an image of how your
 corpus is structured. Then i can use this corpus to feed the
 chatbot with, and we can try to use this chatbot as a QA and
 see how resuts will be, and i will try to modify it or build
 it from scratch.
 
  Eric and me was discussing such idea last July, but i
 was not have enough time, now you raise up the idea to
 surface again, and i will be happy to work on it.
 
  looking forward o hearing from you for further
 cooperation, if you have any question, let me know please.
 
  Best wishes,
  Bayan
 
  --- On Sat, 27/2/10, Kais Dukes dukes.k...@googlemail.com
 wrote:
 
  From: Kais Dukes dukes.k...@googlemail.com
  Subject: Advice Required - Dialog System for the
 Quran
  To: comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk
  Date: Saturday, 27 February, 2010, 20:46
  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 

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RE: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran

2010-02-27 Thread El-Haj, Mahmoud
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