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Results and Lessons of the Question Answering Track at CLEF

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Information Retrieval Evaluation in a Changing World

Abstract

The Question Answering track at CLEF ran for 13 years, from 2003 until 2015. Along these years, many different tasks, resources and evaluation methodologies were developed. We divide the CLEF Question Answering campaigns into four eras: (1) Ungrouped mainly factoid questions asked against monolingual newspapers (2003–2006), (2) Grouped questions asked against newspapers and Wikipedias (2007–2008), (3) Ungrouped questions against multilingual parallel-aligned EU legislative documents (2009–2010), and (4) Questions about a single document using a related document collection as background information (2011–2015). We provide the description and the main results for each of these eras, together with the pilot exercises and other Question Answering tasks that ran in CLEF. Finally, we conclude with some of the lessons learnt along these years.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) LIHLITH project (PCIN-2017-085/AEI).

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Correspondence to Álvaro Rodrigo .

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Peñas, A. et al. (2019). Results and Lessons of the Question Answering Track at CLEF. In: Ferro, N., Peters, C. (eds) Information Retrieval Evaluation in a Changing World. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22948-1_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22948-1_18

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