Overview of QAST 2009

This paper describes the experience of QAST 2009, the third time a pilot track of CLEF has been held aiming to evaluate the task of Question Answering in Speech Transcripts. Four sites submitted results for at least one of the three scenarios (European Parliament debates in English and Spanish and broadcast news in French). In order to assess the impact of potential errors of automatic speech recognition, for each task manual transcripts and three different ASR outputs were provided. In addition an original method of question creation was tried in order to get spontaneous oral questions resulting in two sets of questions (spoken and written). Each participant who had chosen a task, was asked to submit a run for each condition. The QAST 2009 evaluation framework is described, along with descriptions of the three scenarios and their associated data, the system submissions for this pilot track and the official evaluation results.