Disambiguation for Arabic Question-Answering System

Because of the increasing amounts of Arabic content on the Internet and the increasing demand for information, Arabic question answering (QA) systems are gaining great importance. Nevertheless, automatic answering of questions in natural language is one of natural language processing’s most challenging tasks. In this paper, we address the issue of processing Arabic Question Answering in the medical domain where there are several specific challenges. The main challenge in dealing with medical field in Arabic language is the need to resolve ambiguity. This issue, though, was not thoroughly studied in related works. Therefore, our QA system requires disambiguation solution to select the correct meaning in order to return the correct answer. The goal of this work is to resolve Arabic-related ambiguities as well as medical-related ambiguities. To achieve this goal, we use dictionaries and transducers using NooJ platform to answer any factoid or complex medical question. Experimentations of the disambiguation task of our Arabic medical question answering system show interesting results.