Abstract
Arabic Question Answering (QA) is gaining more importance due to the importance of the language and the dramatic increase in online Arabic content. The goal of this article is to review the state-of-the-art of Arabic QA methods, to classify them into different categories from an answer retrieval viewpoint and to present their applications, issues and new trends. The main components of question answering systems are also presented. Finally, this survey provides a comparative study of systems of each type of QA based on several criteria.