The World of Computer Science and Information Technology Journal

5

Authors: Fatima T. AL-Khawaldeh

with the increasing amount of web information, questions answering systems becomes very important to allow users to access to direct answers for their requests. This paper presents an Arabic Questions Answering Systems based on entailment metrics. The type of questions which this paper focuses on is why questions. There are many reasons lead us to develop this system: generally, the lack of Arabic Questions Answering Systems and scarcity Arabic Questions Answering Systems which focus on why questions. The goal of the proposed system in this research is to extract answers from re-ranked retrieved passages which are retrieved by search engines. This system extracts the answer only to why questions. This system is called by EWAQ: Entailment based Why Arabic Questions Answering. Each answer is scored with entailment metrics and ranked according to their scores in order to determine the most possible correct answer. EWAQ is compared with search engines: yahoo, google and ask.com, the well-established web-based Questions Answering systems, using manual test set. In EWAQ experiments, it is showed that the accuracy is increased by implementing the textual entailment in re-raking the retrieved relevant passages by search engines and deciding the correct answer. The obtained results show that using entailment based similarity can help significantly to tackle the why Answer Extraction module in Arabic language. Keywords- Arabic Questions Answering System (AQAS); Entailment Similarity; Why Questions; Answer Extraction (AE); Information Retrieval (IR).

7

Authors: Nasim Matar

This paper presents the use of a new approach towards evaluating the use of e-learning system by faculty members in Jordanian universities. Evaluating the use of any system is aimed towards providing a better understanding for the needs, challenges and opportunities that are expected from using such systems. E-learning as a supportive method for education in Jordanian universities has been available since 2003 [1]. Different studies have provided an assessment for the use of e-learning in Jordan using different tools many of which have been found unstandardized tool for performing the evaluation. Some of those tools managed to give significant results, while others lacked the systematic approach and the use of appropriate methodology. The Concern Based Adoption Model (CBAM) Framework has been created in order to provide 3 different tools to assess the use of innovation tools used within educational context. CBAM framework is widely used in America, Canada and parts of Europe, and this tool has not been used in any research related to Jordan or e-learning in Jordanian universities. This study is the first study to use and provide valuable outputs for assessing the use of e-learning in Jordanian Universities. Keywords-component; CBAM, Evaluation, E-learning, Jordanian Universities, Stages of Concern.