Overview - Question Answering 1999

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The TREC-8 Question Answering track was the first large scale evaluation of domain-independent question answering systems. This paper summarizes the results of the track by giving a brief overview of the different approaches taken to solve the problem. The most accurate systems found a correct response for more than 2/3 of the questions. Relatively simple bag-of-words approaches were adequate for finding answers when responses could be as long as a paragraph (250 bytes), but more sophisticated processing was necessary for more direct responses (50 bytes).

Track coordinator(s):

• E. Voorhees, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
• D. Tice, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Track Web Page: https://trec.nist.gov/data/qamain.html

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