Dear All; I was following this thread with interest. Actually I am not very much optimistic about trusted automated QA system on the Qur'an or Islam that would assume the position of a Qur'anic scholar. However, a simple factoid questions to someone who does not know much facts about Qur'an/Islam can be produced.
I think automated QA is the greatest challenge for artificial intelligence and Alan Turing's challenge still remains a challenge for computational community. Shaping this challenge for the quranic context would mean, that when a user asks a quranic questions he/she would not be able to tell who is answering him/her from behind the screen: a qur'anic scholar or an automated dialogue system :-) so, seconding El-Haj I also think any system should not assume the position of a Mufti. Once I gathered few questions from tafsir section of islam-qa.com and it seemed to me that majority of these questions are geared towards general Muslims who has fair knowledge about the Qur'an but wants clarification on apparent contradictions or confusion about two verses. I would imagine that some good progress could be achieved if the Qur'anic is annotated with much more extra-linguistic tags including information taken from books of tafsir, hadith, fiqh, etc and then sophisticated inference rules are applied, but then again any answer should be first checked by a Qur'anic scholar before passing to the user which then defeats the purpose of a dialogue system which assumes instant answers. However, I think computational linguistics and text mining can be of great help to a qur'anic scholar who can filter any automated output and accept the ones that is correct. Having said that, I am not discouraging this idea of a dialogue system, but rather requesting to define the project properly in terms of the type of questions this system will attempt to answer instantly. I will be interested in collecting a set of factoid question-answers if this projects goes forward. best wishes, Abdul-Baquee On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 3:56 AM, El-Haj, Mahmoud <[email protected]> wrote: > 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/<http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/%7Emelhaj/> > 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<http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/%7Emelhaj/easc.htm> > > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto: > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Kais Dukes > Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2010 6:46 PM > To: [email protected] > 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 > [email protected] - Computational Quranic Arabic discussion list > >
