Extracting names from Arabic text for question-answering systems

Abstract

Tagging and extracting proper names is an important key for improving the effectiveness of questionanswering systems. The valuable information in the text usually is located around proper names, to collect this information it should be found first. By extracting proper names from the text we provide questionanswering systems with both the proper name found in the text, some information about it and where it was found. The proper names in Arabic do not start with capital letter as in many other languages so special treatment is needed to find them in a text. Little research has been conducted in this area; most efforts have been based on a number of heuristic rules used to find names in the text. In this paper we present a new technique to extract names from text by building a database and graphs to represent the words that might form a name and the relationships between them. First we mark the phrases that might include names, second we build graphs to represent the words in these phrases and the relationships between them, third we apply rules to find the names.