Al-Bayan: An Arabic Question Answering System for the Holy Quran

Recently, Question Answering (QA) has been one of the main focus of natural language processing research. However, Arabic Question Answering is still not in the mainstream. The challenges of the Arabic language and the lack of resources have made it difficult to provide Arabic QA systems with high accuracy. While low accuracies may be accepted for general purpose systems, it is critical in some fields such as religious affairs. Therefore, there is a need for specialized accurate systems that target these critical fields. In this paper, we propose Al-Bayan, a new Arabic QA system specialized for the Holy Quran. The system accepts an Arabic question about the Quran, retrieves the most relevant Quran verses, then extracts the passage that contains the answer from the Quran and its interpretation books (Tafseer). Evaluation results on a collected dataset show that the overall system can achieve 85% accuracy using the top-3 results.