Creating the DISEQuA Corpus: a Test Set for Multilingual Question Answering

This paper describes the procedure adopted by the three coordinators of the CLEF 2003 question answering track (ITC-irst, UNED and ILLC) to create the question set for the monolingual tasks. Despite the little resources available, the three groups collaborated and managed to formulate and verify a large pool of original questions posed in three different languages: Dutch, Italian and Spanish. A part of these queries was translated into English and shared between the three coordination groups. Thus, a second cross-verification was conducted, in order to extract the queries that had an answer in all the three monolingual document collections. Finally, the result of the joint efforts was the creation of the DISEQuA (Dutch Italian Spanish English Questions and Answers) corpus, a useful and reusable resource that is freely available for the research community. The article reports on the different stages of the corpus creation, from the monolingual kernels to the multilingual extension.