IDRAAQ: New Arabic Question Answering system based on Query Expansion and Passage Retrieval
Lahsen Abouenour, Karim Bouzoubaa, Paolo Rosso · RiuNet (Universitat Politècnica de València) · 2012
Abstract. Arabic is one of the languages which are less concerned by researchers in the field of Question Answering. The paper presents core modules of a new Arabic Question Answering system called IDRAAQ. These modules aim at enhancing the quality of retrieved passages with respect to a given question. Experiments have been conducted in the framework of the main task of QA4MRE@CLEF 2012 that includes this year the Arabic language. Two runs were submitted. Both runs only use reading test documents to answer questions. The difference between the two runs exists in the answer validation process which is more relaxed in the second run. The Passage Retrieval (PR) module of our system presents multi-levels of processing in order to improve the quality of returned passage and thereafter the performances of the whole system. The PR module of IDRAAQ is based on keyword-based and structure-based levels that respectively consist in: (i) a Query Expansion (QE) process relying on Arabic WordNet semantic relations; (ii) a Distance Density N-gram Model based passage retrieval system. The latter level uses passages retrieved on the basis of QE