This paper reports on the pilot question answering track that was carried out within the CLEF initiative this year. The track was divided into monolingual and bilingual tasks: monolingual systems were evaluated within the frame of three non-English European languages, Dutch, Italian and Spanish, while in the crosslanguage tasks an English document collection constituted the target corpus for Italian, Spanish, Dutch, French and German queries. Participants were given 200 questions for each task, and were allowed to submit up to two runs per task with up to three responses (either exact answers or 50 bytes long strings) per question. We give here an overview of the track: we report on each task and discuss the creation of the multilingual test sets and the participants' results.

The fifth QA campaign at CLEF [1], having its first edition in 2003, offered not only a main task but an Answer Validation Exercise (AVE) [2], which continued last year's pilot, and a new pilot: the Question Answering on Speech Transcripts (QAST) [3, 15]. The main task was characterized by the focus on cross-linguality, while covering as many European languages as possible. As novelty, some QA pairs were grouped in clusters. Every cluster was characterized by a topic (not given to participants). The questions from a cluster possibly contain co-references between one of them and the others. Finally, the need for searching answers in web formats was satisfied by introducing Wikipedia 1 as document corpus. The results and the analyses reported by the participants suggest that the introduction of Wikipedia and the topic related questions led to a drop in systems' performance.

Abstract. The general aim of the third CLEF Multilingual Question Answering Track was to set up a common and replicable evaluation framework to test both monolingual and cross-language Question Answering (QA) systems that process queries and documents in several European languages. Nine target languages and ten source languages were exploited to enact 8 monolingual and 73 cross-language tasks. Twenty-four groups participated in the exercise. Overall results showed a general increase in performance in comparison to last year. The best performing monolingual system irrespective of target language answered 64.5% of the questions correctly (in the monolingual Portuguese task), while the average of the best performances for each target language was 42.6%. The cross-language step instead entailed a considerable drop in performance. In addition to accuracy, the organisers also measured the relation between the correctness of an answer and a system's stated confidence in it, showing that the best systems did not always provide the most reliable confidence score. We provide an overview of the 2005 QA track, detail the procedure followed to build the test sets and present a general analysis of the results. 308A. Vallin et al.

No abstract

This paper describes the procedure adopted by the three co-ordinators of the CLEF 2003 question answering track (ITC-irst, UNED and ILLC) to create the question set for the monolingual tasks. Despite the little resources available, the three groups collaborated and managed to formulate and verify a large pool of original questions posed in three different languages: Dutch, Italian and Spanish. A part of these queries was translated into English and shared between the three coordination groups. Thus, a second cross-verification was conducted, in order to extract the queries that had an answer in all the three monolingual document collections. Finally, the result of the joint efforts was the creation of the DISEQuA (Dutch Italian Spanish English Questions and Answers) corpus, a useful and reusable resource that is freely available for the research community. The article reports on the different stages of the corpus creation, from the monolingual kernels to the multilingual extension.