https://jjcit.org/paper/42 10.5455/jjcit.71-1514749838 Abdelghani Bouziane,Djelloul Bouchiha,Noureddine Doumi,Mimoun Malki Question answering system,Natural language processing (NLP),Linked data,Arabic language,Semantic Web,Ontology,SPARQL. 10 6244 1887 2017-12-31 21-Mar.-2018 and 09-Apr.-2018, 2018-04-15 The increasing interest in Arabic natural language processing and semantic Web research involves an emerging need to the development of new Question Answering Systems (QAS). These systems allow users to ask a question in Arabic natural language and get the relevant answer. However, most existing QA systems focused on English and Latin-based languages. Less effort has been concentrated on the Arabic language, which belongs to "Semitic Languages". This work is an early version of a new domain-independent Arabic question answering system over linked data, which aims to particularly help Arab users to explore the Arabic Semantic Web based on Arabic ontology. We describe with sufficient details the different modules of our proposed system, which uses language parser, finite state automaton and semantic Web techniques to linguistically process and answer Arabic natural language question. Experiments have been carried out to evaluate and show efficiency of the proposed system.