Question answering at the cross-language evaluation forum 2003-2010

The paper offers an overview of the key issues raised during the 8 years’ activity of the Multilingual Question Answering Track at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The general aim of the track has been to test both monolingual and cross-language Question Answering (QA) systems that process queries and documents in several European languages, also drawing attention to a number of challenging issues for research in multilingual QA. The paper gives a brief description of how the task has evolved over the years and of the way in which the data sets have been created, presenting also a short summary of the different types of questions developed. The document collections adopted in the competitions are outlined as well, and data about participation is provided. Moreover, the main A. Peñas Á. Rodrigo NLP & IR Group, UNED, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] Á. Rodrigo e-mail: [email protected] B. Magnini Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-irst), Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] P. Forner (&) D. Giampiccolo Center for the Evaluation of Language and Communication Technologies (CELCT), Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] D. Giampiccolo e-mail: [email protected] R. Sutcliffe University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] 123 Lang Resources & Evaluation DOI 10.1007/s10579-012-9177-0