Evaluation of Automatically Reformulated Questions in Question Series

Having gold standards allows us to evaluate new methods and approaches against a common benchmark. In this paper we describe a set of gold standard question reformulations and associated reformulation guidelines that we have created to support research into automatic interpretation of questions in TREC question series, where questions may refer anaphorically to the target of the series or to answers to previous questions. We also assess various string comparison metrics for their utility as evaluation measures of the proximity of an automated system’s reformulations to the gold standard. Finally we show how we have used this approach to assess the question processing capability of our own QA system and to pinpoint areas for improvement.