Topical and Non-Topical Approaches to Measure Similarity between Arabic Questions

Abstract

Questions are crucial expressions in any language. Many Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Natural Language Understanding (NLU) applications, such as question-answering computer systems, automatic chatting apps (chatbots), digital virtual assistants, and opinion mining, can benefit from accurately identifying similar questions in an effective manner. We detail methods for identifying similarities between Arabic questions that have been posted online by Internet users and organizations. Our novel approach uses a non-topical rule-based methodology and topical information (textual similarity, lexical similarity, and semantic similarity) to determine if a pair of Arabic questions are similarly paraphrased. Our method counts the lexical and linguistic distances between each question. Additionally, it identifies questions in accordance with their format and scope using expert hypotheses (rules) that have been experimentally shown to be useful and practical. Even if there is a high degree of lexical similarity between a When question (Timex Factoid—inquiring about time) and a Who inquiry (Enamex Factoid—asking about a named entity), they will not be similar. In an experiment using 2200 question pairs, our method attained an accuracy of 0.85, which is remarkable given the simplicity of the solution and the fact that we did not employ any language models or word embedding. In order to cover common Arabic queries presented by Arabic Internet users, we gathered the questions from various online forums and resources. In this study, we describe a unique method for detecting question similarity that does not require intensive processing, a sizable linguistic corpus, or a costly semantic repository. Because there are not many rich Arabic textual resources, this is especially important for informal Arabic text processing on the Internet.