Using Arabic Numbers (Singular, Dual, and Plurals) Patterns To Enhance Question Answering System Results

In the field of information retrieval, it is very difficult to answer the question entered by the user, because the search engine retrieve a ranked documents that contain any key word or phrase inside the documents, this need another extra effort to search the answer inside the documents, and there may be no answer. The alternative of search engine is a question answering system, which it retrieves the exact answer of the question in the natural language if found. A question answering system accepts the question in the natural, then many processes were done to extract the exact answer. In general a question answering system is composed of three main components: question classification module, information retrieval module and answer extraction module. A question answering system is applied in holy Quran which written and cited in Arabic language, some characteristic of the Arabic language were used to enhance the answer extraction, one of these important characteristics is numbering, singular, dual and plural. A prototype build uses special pattern used to process the number in Arabic language, which enhance the answers by adding more words and meaning. A corpus of questions and its answers from holy Quran used to test and answers the question.