🧠 PerCQA: A Persian Community Question Answering Dataset

PerCQA is the first large-scale dataset for Community Question Answering (CQA) in the Persian language. It was created to support research in question retrieval, answer selection, and overall QA system development for low-resource languages, particularly Persian.

This dataset was introduced in the paper:

Naghmeh Jamali, Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh, and Heshaam Faili. (2022). PerCQA: A Persian Community Question Answering Dataset. In Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022).

📦 Dataset Structure

Each question thread in PerCQA includes:

A question post
A list of answers (comments)
Annotations indicating the quality of each answer (Good / Bad)

Data Fields

Field	Description
`qid`	Unique ID of the question
`question`	The text of the original question
`answers`	A list of answer texts
`labels`	Corresponding quality labels for each answer

📊 Statistics

Number of questions: 989
Total answer instances: 21,915
Language: Persian (Farsi)
Annotation: Manual, using quality standards adapted from SemEval CQA tasks

🔍 Intended Use

PerCQA is useful for tasks including:

Answer selection and ranking
Question classification
Multilingual and cross-lingual QA research
Low-resource NLP

💬 Languages

Primary: Persian (Farsi)
The dataset includes questions and answers written in colloquial Persian, often with informal expressions typical of online communities.

📚 Citation

Please cite the following paper if you use this dataset:

@inproceedings{jamali-etal-2022-percqa,
    title = "{P}er{CQA}: {P}ersian Community Question Answering Dataset",
    author = "Jamali, Naghme  and
      Yaghoobzadeh, Yadollah  and
      Faili, Heshaam",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      B{\'e}chet, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric  and
      Blache, Philippe  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Cieri, Christopher  and
      Declerck, Thierry  and
      Goggi, Sara  and
      Isahara, Hitoshi  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Mazo, H{\'e}l{\`e}ne  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Piperidis, Stelios",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
    month = jun,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Marseille, France",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.654/",
    pages = "6083--6092"}
}