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A less common and more challenging question to deal with is the<jats:italic>why<\/jats:italic>-question. In this paper, we introduce<jats:sc>Lemaza<\/jats:sc>(Arabic for<jats:italic>why<\/jats:italic>), a system for automatically answering<jats:italic>why<\/jats:italic>-questions for Arabic texts. The system is composed of four main components that make use of the Rhetorical Structure Theory. To evaluate<jats:sc>Lemaza<\/jats:sc>, we prepared a set of<jats:italic>why<\/jats:italic>-question\u2013answer pairs whose answer can be found in a corpus that we compiled out of Open Source Arabic Corpora.<jats:sc>Lemaza<\/jats:sc>performed best when the stop-words were not removed. The performance measure was 72.7%, 79.2% and 78.7% for recall, precision and<jats:italic>c@1<\/jats:italic>, respectively.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1017\/s1351324917000304","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2017,8,24]],"date-time":"2017-08-24T09:01:55Z","timestamp":1503565315000},"page":"877-903","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":25,"title":["<scp><i>Lemaza<\/i><\/scp>: An Arabic why-question answering system"],"prefix":"10.1017","volume":"23","author":[{"given":"AQIL M.","family":"AZMI","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"NOUF A.","family":"ALSHENAIFI","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"56","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2017,8,24]]},"reference":[{"key":"S1351324917000304_ref062","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1207\/s15516709cog2805_6"},{"key":"S1351324917000304_ref040","unstructured":"Oh J. H. , Torisawa K. , Hashimoto C. , Sano M. , De Saeger S. , and Ohtake K. , 2013. Why-question answering using intra and intersentential causal relations. In Proceedings 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistic (ACL 2013), Sofia, Bulgaria, pp. 1733\u201343."},{"key":"S1351324917000304_ref024","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/s10579-004-1917-3"},{"key":"S1351324917000304_ref057","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Tymoshenko K. , and Moschitti A. , 2015. Assessing the impact of syntactic and semantic structures for answer passages reranking. In Proceedings of The 24th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2015), Melbourne, Australia, pp. 1451\u201360.","DOI":"10.1145\/2806416.2806490"},{"key":"S1351324917000304_ref049","unstructured":"Seif A. , Mathkour H. , and Touir A. , 2005. An RST computational tool for the Arabic language. 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