The Query of Everything: Developing Open-Domain, Natural-Language Queries for BOLT Information Retrieval

The DARPA BOLT Information Retrieval evaluations target open-domain natural-language queries over a large corpus of informal text in English, Chinese and Egyptian Arabic. We outline the goals of BOLT IR, comparing it with the prior GALE Distillation task. After discussing the properties of the BOLT IR corpus, we provide a detailed description of the query creation process, contrasting the summary query format presented to systems at run time with the full query format created by annotators. We describe the relevance criteria used to assess BOLT system responses, highlighting the evolution of the procedures used over the three evaluation phases. We provide a detailed review of the decision points model for relevance assessment introduced during Phase 2, and conclude with information about inter-assessor consistency achieved with the decision points assessment model.