Providing a Religious Corpus of Question Answering System in Persian

Question answering system is a field in natural language processing and information retrieval noticed by researchers in these decades. Due to a growing interest in this field of research, the need to have appropriate data sources is perceived. Most researches about developing question answering corpus area have been done in English so far, but in other languages as Persian, the lack of these corpora is perceived. In this article, the development of a Persian question answering corpus called Rasayel&massayel will be discussed. This corpus consists of 2,118 non-factoid and 2,051 factoid questions that for each question, question text, question type, question difficulty from questioner and responder’s perspective, expected answer type in coarse-grained and fine-grained level, exact answer, and page and paraghraph number of answer are annotated. The prposed corpus can be applied to learn components of question answering system, including question classification, information retrieval, and answer extraction. This corpus is freely available for the academic purpose as well. In the following, a question answering system is presented on the Rasayel&massayel corpus. Our experimental result represents that the intended proposed system has achieved 82.29 % accuracy and 56.73 % mean reciprocal rank. It could be also claimed that this is the first ever question answering system and corpus with such features in Persian.