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We describe the corpus and the main challenges it poses due to its mix of informal and formal language, and of different Arabic dialects, as well as due to its medical nature. We further present a shared task on cQA at SemEval, the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, based on this corpus. We discuss the features and the machine learning approaches used by the teams who participated in the task, with focus on the models that exploit syntactic information using convolutional tree kernels and neural word embeddings. We further analyze and extend the outcome of the SemEval challenge by training a meta-classifier combining the output of several systems. This allows us to compare different features and different learning algorithms in an indirect way. Finally, we analyze the most frequent errors common to all approaches, categorizing them into prototypical cases, and zooming into the way syntactic information in tree kernel approaches can help solve some of the most difficult cases. We believe that our analysis and the lessons learned from the process of corpus creation as well as from the shared task analysis will be helpful for future research on Arabic cQA.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1017\/s1351324918000426","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,12,19]],"date-time":"2018-12-19T12:12:30Z","timestamp":1545221550000},"page":"5-41","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":8,"title":["Arabic community question answering"],"prefix":"10.1017","volume":"25","author":[{"given":"PRESLAV","family":"NAKOV","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"LLU\u00cdS","family":"M\u00c0RQUEZ","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"ALESSANDRO","family":"MOSCHITTI","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"HAMDY","family":"MUBARAK","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"56","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,12,19]]},"reference":[{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref084","first-page":"250","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing","author":"Zhou","year":"2015"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref082","first-page":"1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering","author":"Wissal","year":"2009"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref081","first-page":"130","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 27th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education","author":"Wise","year":"1996"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref080","first-page":"707","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing","author":"Wang","year":"2015"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref079","first-page":"1201","article-title":"Graph kernels","volume":"11","author":"Vishwanathan","year":"2010","journal-title":"Journal of Machine Learning Research"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref078","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1451","DOI":"10.1145\/2806416.2806490","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 24th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management","author":"Tymoshenko","year":"2015"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref077","first-page":"40","volume-title":"Proceedings of the LREC Workshop on Language Resources and Human Language Technologies for Semitic Languages","author":"Trigui","year":"2010"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref076","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1017\/S135132491000001X"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref075","first-page":"10","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing","author":"Silberztein","year":"2005"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref074","first-page":"275","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence","author":"Shen","year":"2015"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref073","first-page":"1067","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 37th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval","author":"Severyn","year":"2014"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref072","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"373","DOI":"10.1145\/2766462.2767738","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval","author":"Severyn","year":"2015"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref070","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"741","DOI":"10.1145\/2348283.2348383","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 35th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval","author":"Severyn","year":"2012"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref068","first-page":"586","volume-title":"Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems","author":"Salem","year":"2010"},{"key":"S1351324918000426_ref067","unstructured":"Rosso P. , Lyhyaoui A. , Pe\u00f1arrubia J. , Montes y G\u00f3mez M. , Benajiba Y. , and Raissouni N. 2005. 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