A Chatbot as a Natural Web Interface to Arabic Web QA

• Main Author: Bayan Abu Shawar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kassel University Press 2011-03-01
• Series: International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET)
• Subjects: chatbot; information; retrieval; question; answering; system
• Online Access: http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/1502

In this paper, we describe a way to access Arabic Web Question Answering (QA) corpus using a chatbot, without the need for sophisticated natural language processing or logical inference. Any Natural Language (NL) interface to Question Answer (QA) system is constrained to reply with the given answers, so there is no need for NL generation to recreate well-formed answers, or for deep analysis or logical inference to map user input questions onto this logical ontology; simple (but large) set of pattern-template matching rules will suffice. In previous research, this approach works properly with English and other European languages. In this paper, we try to see how the same chatbot will react in terms of Arabic Web QA corpus. Initial results shows that 93% of answers were correct, but because of a lot of characteristics related to Arabic language, changing Arabic questions into other forms may lead to no answers.