# Neural Arabic Question Answering

## TL;DR

This paper develops an Arabic open domain question answering system leveraging Wikipedia, introducing a new dataset and combining information retrieval with BERT-based reading comprehension, achieving promising results.

## Contribution

It introduces the Arabic Reading Comprehension Dataset (ARCD) and a novel open domain QA system (SOQAL) that integrates hierarchical TF-IDF retrieval with BERT-based reading.

## Key findings

- BERT-based reader achieves 61.3 F1 on ARCD.
- SOQAL achieves 27.6 F1 on open domain QA.
- The new dataset supports Arabic QA research.

## Abstract

This paper tackles the problem of open domain factual Arabic question answering (QA) using Wikipedia as our knowledge source. This constrains the answer of any question to be a span of text in Wikipedia. Open domain QA for Arabic entails three challenges: annotated QA datasets in Arabic, large scale efficient information retrieval and machine reading comprehension. To deal with the lack of Arabic QA datasets we present the Arabic Reading Comprehension Dataset (ARCD) composed of 1,395 questions posed by crowdworkers on Wikipedia articles, and a machine translation of the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (Arabic-SQuAD). Our system for open domain question answering in Arabic (SOQAL) is based on two components: (1) a document retriever using a hierarchical TF-IDF approach and (2) a neural reading comprehension model using the pre-trained bi-directional transformer BERT. Our experiments on ARCD indicate the effectiveness of our approach with our BERT-based reader achieving a 61.3 F1 score, and our open domain system SOQAL achieving a 27.6 F1 score.