AQAD: 17,000+ Arabic Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text
Adel Atef, Bassam Mattar, Sandra Sherif, Eman Elrefai, Marwan Torki
Abstract
Current Arabic Machine Reading for Question Answering datasets suffer from important shortcomings. The available datasets are either small-sized high-quality collections or large-sized low-quality datasets. To address the aforementioned problems we present our Arabic Question-Answer dataset (AQAD). AQAD is a new Arabic reading comprehension large-sized high-quality dataset consisting of 17,000+ questions and answers. To collect the AQAD dataset, we present a fully automated data collector. Our collector works on a set of Arabic Wikipedia articles for the extractive question answering task. The chosen articles match the articles used in the well-known Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD). We provide evaluation results on the AQAD dataset using two state-of-the-art models for machine-reading question answering problems. Namely, BERT and BIDAF models which result in 0.37 and 0.32 F-1 measure on AQAD dataset.