Overview of the NTCIR-5 Cross-Lingual Question Answering Task (CLQA1)

This paper gives an overview of the NTCIR-5 Cross-Lingual Question Answering Task (CLQA1), an evaluation campaign for Cross-Lingual Question Answering technology. This evaluation was carried out in June 2005. In CLQA1, we aimed to promote research on cross-lingual Question Answering technology mainly for East Asian languages. As the first attempt, we conducted evaluations of five subtasks: JE, EJ, CE, CC, and EC subtasks, where C, E, and J stand for Chinese, English, and Japanese, respectively, and XY indicates that questions are given in language X and answers are extracted from documents written in language Y. For the purpose of system development, we provided 200-300 sample question/answer pairs for each subtask. The Formal Run evaluation was conducted during June 13-27, 2005 with 200 test questions. As a result, 13 research institutes world-wide participated in CLQA1, and 89 runs were submitted in total.