AHJL at Qur’an QA 2023 Shared Task: Enhancing Passage Retrieval using Sentence Transformer and Translation

Hessa Alawwad, Lujain Alawwad, Jamilah Alharbi, Abdullah Alharbi


Abstract
The Holy Qur’an is central to Islam, influencing around two billion Muslims globally, and is known for its linguistic richness and complexity. This article discusses our involvement in the PR task (Task A) of the Qur’an QA 2023 Shared Task. We used two models: one employing the Sentence Transformer and the other using OpenAI’s embeddings for document retrieval. Both models, equipped with a translation feature, help interpret and understand Arabic language queries by translating them, executing the search, and then reverting the results to Arabic. Our results show that incorporating translation functionalities improves the performance in Arabic Question-Answering systems. The model with translation enhancement performed notably better in all metrics compared to the non-translation model.
Anthology ID:
2023.arabicnlp-1.77
Volume:
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore (Hybrid)
Editors:
Hassan Sawaf, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Wajdi Zaghouani, Walid Magdy, Ahmed Abdelali, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Nizar Habash, Salam Khalifa, Amr Keleg, Hatem Haddad, Imed Zitouni, Khalil Mrini, Rawan Almatham
Venues:
ArabicNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
702–707
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.77
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.arabicnlp-1.77
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hessa Alawwad, Lujain Alawwad, Jamilah Alharbi, and Abdullah Alharbi. 2023. AHJL at Qur’an QA 2023 Shared Task: Enhancing Passage Retrieval using Sentence Transformer and Translation. In Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023, pages 702–707, Singapore (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AHJL at Qur’an QA 2023 Shared Task: Enhancing Passage Retrieval using Sentence Transformer and Translation (Alawwad et al., ArabicNLP-WS 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.77.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.77.mp4