An Arabic chatbot giving answers from the Qur'an

We present machine-learning techniques used to generate an Arabic chatbot, which accepts user input in Arabic and generates replies extracted from the Qur'an. A system to learn conversational patterns from a Corpus of transcribed conversation has been used to generate a range of chatbots speaking different languages including English, French and Afrikaans. We review aspects of the Arabic language, which pose problems for chatbot-learning, and we discuss the revised process to handle Arabic training text and input/output. In principle, the Qur'an provides guidance and answers to religious and other questions; so we used the Qur'an as a training corpus for our chatbot. As the Qur'an is not a transcription of a conversation, we adapted the learning process to cope with the structure of the Qur'an in terms of sooras and ayyas. The resulting system accepts user input in Arabic, and answers with appropriate ayyas from the Qur'an.