An Arabic question-answering system for factoid questions

In this paper, we propose an Arabic Question-Answering (Q-A) system called QASAL (Question-Answering system for Arabic Language). QASAL accepts as an input a natural language question written in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and generates as an output the most efficient and appropriate answer. The proposed system is composed of three modules: A question analysis module, a passage retrieval module and an answer extraction module. To process these three modules we use the NooJ Platform which represents a linguistic development environment.