RE: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran
Dear Mazhar, Although your question is a bit unrelated to the discussion but kindly refer to the following verses: An-Nisa' [4,59] 'Ali `Imran [3,7] An-Nahl [16,43] Al-'Anbya' [21,7] Hope it will answer your question. Best, Mahmoud From: comp-quran-requ...@comp.leeds.ac.uk [mailto:comp-quran-requ...@comp.leeds.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Mazhar Anwar Nurani Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2010 2:56 PM To: waj...@ldc.upenn.edu Cc: comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk Subject: RE: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran Assalamo Alaikum, Is there any verse wherein Allah and His Messenger s.a.s allowed any Sheikh to issue Fatwa? Mazhar A. Nurani --- On Sun, 2/28/10, waj...@ldc.upenn.edu waj...@ldc.upenn.edu wrote: From: waj...@ldc.upenn.edu waj...@ldc.upenn.edu Subject: RE: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran To: El-Haj, Mahmoud mel...@essex.ac.uk Cc: Kais Dukes dukes.k...@googlemail.com, comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk Date: Sunday, February 28, 2010, 6:34 AM 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.ukhttp://us.mc573.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=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:
Re: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran
Eric, You raise some good interesting points here. Let me answer these in turn: - (1) If you stick with questions like these, what is the difference with an index or concordance? - My answer to this is that a Question-Answering system (from a computer-science perspective) can be considered quite similar to a very powerful index or concordance, but is also supposed to do different things. Firstly, the medium is different - questions and answers are exchanged in a more natural way, which some users might find easier to use. Although many Quranic experts and scholars do prefer to look things up themselves from existing indices and books, I would still say that a QA system is quite useful because it provides a different interface and user experience - something that many people might feel more comfortable with. Here is a good example: http://start.csail.mit.edu The START QA system has answered millions of online user questions, over many years. You could apply the same argument to any QA system - what is the point of them? Why do so many people bother to use START, why not just use Wikipedia for example? (of course only a very small percentage of total web users use START, but still they do find it useful and interesting). The short answer is that different people like different things, many people prefer to look things up themselves, but people also like to use different types of interface, an interface that hopefully appears more natural. Aside from that, one would hope that a QA system would do things that a concordance or index can't do. A simple example might be the ability to map many different question terms to common base terms, e.g. The Prophet Muhammad and Mohamad might actually be mapped by a QA system and normalized to the same input. - (2) I would say that paraphrasing the word of God is not a good idea - I completely agree with this. My preference is to apply information retrieval and question-answering which is backed by verses of the Quran, that is we possibly aim for a system which relies on the knowledge contained in existing verses of the Quran. - (3) one cannot lift one verse up and present it out of its context; important nuances might very well be lost (not to mention the extensive literature on asbab al-nuzul, tafsir, sirah, ahadith etc. to contextualize the Quran even more). - This is a complicated topic, with many schools of thought. It is important not to generalize here. There are those who believe that the Quran requires a large amount of background information in order to be accessible. While this may be true for some verses, there is also an opinion that that the Quran is accessible to the general reader, and often doesn’t require detailed further explanation in order to get the basic or stragithforward meaning of many verses. I would suggest that we tackle this by first concentrating on the simple verses which don’t require much detailed explanation to understand. For example: Verse (21:30) - Have those who disbelieved not considered that the heavens and the earth were a joined entity, and We separated them and made from water every living thing? Then will they not believe? Many detailed analyses have been performed for this verse over the centuries, but at the same time, it does carry an important piece of information which is easy to understand - the importance of water to life in the context of creation. - (4) So to conclude, is what you want pretty much the same as an index/concordance? Then go with that. If you think the QA-system would be different from that, please take note of the pitfalls I've indicated here. - Again, I would agree with you here. Of course there is no point building a question-answering system if it is nothing more than an index or concordance. However, at the same time, it is probably better to take a balanced viewpoint on this. I disagree with the view that there is no point to this system because it’s too hard, adds no real value, or is too controversial. Similarly, I would also disagree with the view that such a system is very easy to build, is extremely useful and will replace other ways of looking at the Quran. We should also not expect an initial system to be able to perform any type of detailed inference. Instead, I would suggest that we take a lot of what you have said onboard, and consider a more balanced opinion. Some important things to keep in mind are: - Not everybody likes looking at things in the same way. Although many religious studies experts and Quranic scholars do indeed like to use indexes, books, and detailed references, many people do not always like this approach. Some people are comfortable with a more natural dialog system, and are happy reading a small selection of verses of the Quran as an introduction to a wider topic. For example, young students, non-Muslims, people interested in the Quranpeople
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