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
