It is neither possible nor fair to compare the performance of question-answering systems for the Holy Quran and Hadith Sharif in Arabic due to both the absence of a golden test dataset on the Hadith Sharif and the small size and easy questions of the newly created golden test dataset on the Holy Quran. This article presents two question–answer datasets: Hadith Question–Answer pairs (HAQA) and Quran Question–Answer pairs (QUQA). HAQA is the first Arabic Hadith question–answer dataset available to the research community, while the QUQA dataset is regarded as the more challenging and the most extensive collection of Arabic question–answer pairs on the Quran. HAQA was designed and its data collected from several expert sources, while QUQA went through several steps in the construction phase; that is, it was designed and then integrated with existing datasets in different formats, after which the datasets were enlarged with the addition of new data from books by experts. The HAQA corpus consists of 1598 question–answer pairs, and that of QUQA contains 3382. They may be useful as gold–standard datasets for the evaluation process, as training datasets for language models with question-answering tasks and for other uses in artificial intelligence.

The Qur’an QA 2023 shared task has two sub tasks: Passage Retrieval (PR) task and Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task. Our participation in the PR task was to further train several Arabic pre-trained models using a Sentence-Transformers architecture and to ensemble the best performing models. The results of the test set did not reflect the results of the development set. CL-AraBERT achieved the best results, with a 0.124 MAP. We also participate in the MRC task by further fine-tuning the base and large variants of AraBERT using Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic datasets. Base AraBERT achieved the best result with the development set with a partial average precision (pAP) of 0.49, while it achieved 0.5 with the test set. In addition, we applied the ensemble approach of best performing models and post-processing steps to the final results. Our experiments with the development set showed that our proposed model achieved a 0.537 pAP. On the test set, our system obtained a pAP score of 0.49.

Question answering is a specialized area in the field of NLP that aims to extract the answer to a user question from a given text. Most studies in this area focus on the English language, while other languages, such as Arabic, are still in their early stage. Recently, research tend to develop question answering systems for Arabic Islamic texts, which may impose challenges due to Classical Arabic. In this paper, we use Simple Transformers Question Answering model with three Arabic pre-trained language models (AraBERT, CAMeL-BERT, ArabicBERT) for Qur’an Question Answering task using Qur’anic Reading Comprehension Dataset. The model is set to return five answers ranking from the best to worst based on their probability scores according to the task details. Our experiments with development set shows that AraBERT V0.2 model outperformed the other Arabic pre-trained models. Therefore, AraBERT V0.2 was chosen for the the test set and it performed fair results with 0.45 pRR score, 0.16 EM score and 0.42 F1 score.