The multiple language question answering track at CLEF 2003

Abstract

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 cross-language 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 byte 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.