# 🧠 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**](https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.654/). 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:

```bibtex
@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"}
}