Development of Yes/No Arabic Question Answering System

Developing Question Answering systems has been one of the important research issues because it requiresinsights from a variety of disciplines, including, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, InformationExtraction, Natural Language Processing, and Psychology. In this paper we realize a formal model for alightweight semantic–based open domain yes/no Arabic question answering system based on paragraphretrieval (with variable length). We propose a constrained semantic representation. Using an explicitunification framework based on semantic similarities and query expansion (synonyms and antonyms). Thisfrequently improves the precision of the system. Employing the passage retrieval system achieves a betterprecision by retrieving more paragraphs that contain relevant answers to the question; It significantlyreduces the amount of text to be processed by the system.