Motivated by the need for intelligent question answering (QA) systems on the Holy Qur’an and the success of the first Qur’an Question Answering shared task (Qur’an QA 2022 at OSACT 2022), we have organized the second version at ArabicNLP 2023. The Qur’an QA 2023 is composed of two sub-tasks: the passage retrieval (PR) task and the machine reading comprehension (MRC) task. The main aim of the shared task is to encourage state-of-the-art research on Arabic PR and MRC on the Holy Qur’an. Our shared task has attracted 9 teams to submit 22 runs for the PR task, and 6 teams to submit 17 runs for the MRC task. In this paper, we present an overview of the task and provide an outline of the approaches employed by the participating teams in both sub-tasks.

Motivated by the resurgence of the machine reading comprehension (MRC) research, we have organized the first Qur’an Question Answering shared task, “Qur’an QA 2022”. The task in its first year aims to promote state-of-the-art research on Arabic QA in general and MRC in particular on the Holy Qur’an, which constitutes a rich and fertile source of knowledge for Muslim and non-Muslim inquisitors and knowledge-seekers. In this paper, we provide an overview of the shared task that succeeded in attracting 13 teams to participate in the final phase, with a total of 30 submitted runs. Moreover, we outline the main approaches adopted by the participating teams in the context of highlighting some of our perceptions and general trends that characterize the participating systems and their submitted runs.