A comprehensive survey of techniques for developing an Arabic question answering system

Abstract

The question-answering system (QAS) aims to produce a response to a query using information from a text corpus. Arabic is a complex language. However, it has more than 450 million native speakers across the globe. The Saudi Arabian government encourages organizations to automate their routine activities to provide adequate services to their stakeholders. The performance of current Arabic QASs is limited to the specific domain. An effective QAS retrieves relevant responses from structured and unstructured data based on the user query. Many QAS studies categorized QASs according to factors, including user queries, dataset characteristics, and the nature of the responses. A more comprehensive examination of QASs is required to improve the QAS development according to the present QAS requirements. The current literature presents the features and classifications of the Arabic QAS. There is a lack of studies to report the techniques of Arabic QAS development. Thus, this study suggests a systematic literature review of strategies for developing Arabic QAS. A total of 617 articles were collected, and 40 papers were included in the proposed review. The outcome reveals the importance of the dataset and the deep learning techniques used to improve the performance of the QAS. The existing systems depend on supervised learning methods that lower QAS performance. In addition, the recent development of machine learning techniques encourages researchers to develop unsupervised QAS.