Arabic Rhetorical Relations Extraction for Answering "Why" and "How to" Questions

In the current study we aim at exploiting discourse structure of Arabic text to automatically finding answers to non-factoid questions ("Why" and "How to"). Our method is based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that many studies have shown to be a very effective approach for many computational linguistics applications such as (text generation, text summarization and machine translation). For both types of questions we assign one or more rhetorical relations that help discovering the corresponding answers. This is the first Arabic Question Answering system that attempts to answer the “Why” and “How to” questions.