Automatically finding answers to "why" and "how to" questions for arabic language

Abstract

This paper addresses the task of extracting answers to why and how to-questions from Arabic texts which has not been addressed yet for Arabic language in the field of question answering systems (QA). The system developed here uses one of the leading theories in computational linguistics called Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and based on cue phrases to both determine the elementary units and the set of rhetorical relations that is relevant to the targeted questions. Our experiment has been conducted on Arabic raw texts (automatically annotated) taken from Arabic websites and has gave a good result comparing with a one already done before to why-questions answering for English language. © Springer-Verlag 2010.