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: comp-quran-requ...@comp.leeds.ac.ukhttp
Re: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran
who might not have English as their first language, but would still like to use a simple QA system etc. - Although some verses of the Quran require detailed background information before any meaning can be obtained, there are also many verses with clear contained ideas and propositions. - Just because something is hard, possibly controversial, and may have some drawbacks and limitations, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t proceed. Any good piece of science includes an experiment with an often uncertain outcome. We don't know until we try. Based on this, I do agree with you (and others) that there are many things to consider here, but I along with many other members of this mailing list do look forward to a simple Question-Answering for the Quran. Although you yourself Eric might not find it very useful, as I do agree with you there are of course many other better resources out there - let’s keep in mind that different people like different things, and that I’m very sure that a simple Question-Answering system will attract many new visitors and users to the website. I could be wrong - but we will never know until we try :-) Of course there are many things we need to keep in mind, but I would like to suggest we move this discussion on to more practical concerns. My biggest interest in developing even a simple QA system, is that we can't do something even better and more advanced without starting with the basics first. So even if this system is quite simple, we should go ahead and not give up - otherwise, how will we ever build anything at all, if we don't start with the first few simple steps towards something more powerful? I have very humble aims for a simple Question-Answering system. However, I wonder what people thought about the Wright Brothers' attempts at building the first airplane? :-) I would welcome some positive constructive ideas on how to proceed with the simple Quran QA system. In particular, any contributions for lists of questions, and matching verses with answers are most welcome. Kind Regards, -- Kais On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 3:37 PM, Eric van Lit fifkik...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Kais and everybody else, I want to point out that the questions you suggested all revolve around one word: Allah - Who is Allah? Muhammad - Who was Muhammad? Islam - What is Islam? prophets - Which prophets are mentioned in the Quran? Solomon - Is Solomon mentioned in the Quran? Jesus - What does the Quran say about Jesus? religions - List the religions mentioned in the Quran. If you stick with questions like these, what is the difference with an index or concordance? Or is your intention to generate a coherent answer from the relevant verses? If so, I would say that paraphrasing the word of God is not a good idea (this objection is similar to my objection to the pronoun resolution). Also be aware that much of the Quran is context dependent and so 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). Yes, we live in a time where it seems that everything has to be summarized in one catchy quote (i.e. if it doesn't fit in a Twitter tweet, it's not important to read) but I honestly don't think an approach like that to the Quran is a correct one. The very character of the Quran - and I mean for example its lack of one big narrative and its apparent contradiction throughout the text - forces the reader to spend time on it, to read bigger parts of it than just some verses here and there. To decompose the Quran to its verse-structure (or do you want to cut into even smaller pieces for this?) and put it back together in an order you deem best is a guarantee for losing its aesthetics and thereby its unique character. 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. Just my 2 cents of course. Eric van Lit M.A. student McGill University Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:48:23 + Subject: Re: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran From: dukes.k...@googlemail.com To: comp-quran@comp.leeds.ac.uk Hello, This discussion thread is getting quite interesting indeed. What do you all think of START - the natural language question answering system? http://start.csail.mit.edu I think it's pretty good for simple facts, especially as it usually cites the original source resource for each answer. With regards to a Quranic QA system, I think that so far the general consensus on this mailing list is that there could be two types of system: (1) A very basic fact system, which can answer simple questions from knowledge in the Quran, backed by Quranic verses. (2) A much more advanced system, which combines
Re: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran
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
RE: Advice Required - Dialog System for the Quran
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
