Structure-based evaluation of an arabic semantic query expansion using the JIRS passage retrieval system

Abstract

The adoption of semantic Query Expansion (QE) could be useful in the context of Question/Answering (Q/A) systems. For the Arabic language this is a challenging task since it has many particularities (short vowels, absence of capital letters, complex morphology, etc.). This paper presents an evaluation of a proposed semantic QE based on Arabic WordNet (AWN). Two types of experiments are conducted: the keyword-based evaluation which uses a classical search engine as passage retrieval system, and the structure-based evaluation that uses the Java Information Retrieval System (JIRS) which takes into account the structure of the question. Results show that the best performances in terms of accuracy and Mean Reciprocal Rank are reached when the proposed semantic QE together with JIRS are used.