How to extract Arabic definitions from the web? Arabic definition question answering system

Abstract

The Web is the most interest information resource available for users, but the issue is how to obtain the precise and the exact information easily and quickly. The classic information retrieval system such as Web search engines can just return snippets and links to Web pages according to a user query. And it is the role of the user to fetch these results and identify the appropriate information. In this paper, we propose dealing with the results returned by Web search engines to return the appropriate information to a user question. The solution proposed is integrated in an Arabic definition question answering system called 'DefArabicQA'. The experiment was carried out using 140 Arabic definition questions and 2360 snippets returned by divers Web search engines. The result obtained so far is very encouraging and it can be outperformed more in the future. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.