niksss at Qur’an QA 2022: A Heavily Optimized BERT Based Model for Answering Questions from the Holy Qu’ran

This paper presents the system description by team niksss for the Qur’an QA 2022 Shared Task. The goal of this shared task was to evaluate systems for Arabic Reading Comprehension over the Holy Quran. The task was set up as a question-answering task, such that, given a passage from the Holy Quran (consisting of consecutive verses in a specific surah(Chapter)) and a question (posed in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)) over that passage, the system is required to extract a span of text from that passage as an answer to the question. The span was required to be an exact sub-string of the passage. We attempted to solve this task using three techniques namely conditional text-to-text generation, embedding clustering, and transformers-based question answering.