Shaimaa Hassanein
2025
Can LLMs Directly Retrieve Passages for Answering Questions from Qur’an?
Sohaila Eltanbouly
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Salam Albatarni
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Shaimaa Hassanein
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Tamer Elsayed
Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
The Holy Qur’an provides timeless guidance, addressing modern challenges and offering answers to many important questions. The Qur’an QA 2023 shared task introduced the Qur’anic Passage Retrieval (QPR) task, which involves retrieving relevant passages in response to MSA questions. In this work, we evaluate the ability of seven pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to retrieve relevant passages from the Qur’an in response to given questions, considering zero-shot and several few-shot scenarios. Our experiments show that the best model, Claude, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art QPR model by 28 points on MAP and 38 points on MRR, exhibiting an impressive improvement of about 113% and 82%, respectively.