Making Test Corpora for Question Answering More Representative

Despite two high profile series of challenges devoted to question answering technologies there remains no formal study into the representativeness that question corpora bear to real end-user inputs. We examine the corpora used presently and historically in the TREC and QALD challenges in juxtaposition with two more from natural sources and identify a degree of disjointedness between the two. We analyse these differences in depth before discussing a candidate approach to question corpora generation and provide a juxtaposition on its own representativeness. We conclude that these artificial corpora have good overall coverage of grammatical structures but the distribution is skewed, meaning performance measures may be inaccurate.