Improving Question Analysis for Arabic Question Answering in the Medical Domain

Authors

  • Sondes Dardour University of Sfax
  • Hela Fehri University of Sfax
  • Kais Haddar University of Sfax

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13053/cys-26-3-4345

Keywords:

Question answering, Arabic, disambiguation, medical domain, dictionary, transducer

Abstract

Question analysis is a basic module in a question answering (QA) system, and its quality affects the performance of QA system. In this paper, we address the problem of Arabic question analysis in the medical domain where several specific challenges are met. The major challenging issue in processing Arabic medical question is the need for ambiguity resolution. Nevertheless, this issue has not been well studied in related works. Our question analysis uses dictionaries and transducers to analyze any medical question, factoid or complex. This module detects important elements of the question, including: different words in the question that identify what the user wants to ask for, and the nature of the expected answer. To identify well these elements a step of disambiguation is applied. Then, the words used in the question will be extended by adding new words that connect semantically to those in the question. Experimentation of the question analysis module of our Arabic medical question answering system show interesting results.

Author Biographies

Sondes Dardour, University of Sfax

MIRACL Laboratory

Hela Fehri, University of Sfax

MIRACL Laboratory

Kais Haddar, University of Sfax

MIRACL Laboratory

Downloads

Published

2022-08-31

Issue

Vol. 26 No. 3 (2022): 26(3) 2022

Section

Articles

License 

Hereby I transfer exclusively to the Journal "Computación y 
Sistemas", published by the Computing Research Center (CIC-IPN),
the Copyright of the aforementioned paper. I also accept that these 
rights will not be transferred to any other publication, in any other 
format, language or other existing means of developing.
I certify that the paper has not been previously disclosed or simultaneo
usly submitted to any other publication, and that it does not contain 
material whose publication would violate the Copyright or other 
proprietary rights of any person, company or institution. I certify that 
I have the permission from the institution or company where I work or 
study to publish this work.
The representative author accepts the responsibility for the publication
of this paper on behalf of each and every one of the authors. 
This transfer is subject to the following conditions:
  • The authors retain all ownership rights (such as patent rights) of this work, except for the publishing rights transferred to the CIC, through this document.
  • Authors retain the right to publish the work in whole or in part in any book they are the authors or publishers. They can also make use of this work in conferences, courses, personal web pages, and so on.
  • Authors may include working as part of his thesis, for non-profit distribution only.