University of Lethbridge's Participation in TREC 2004 QA Track

Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), organised by National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), is a set of tracks that represent different areas of text retrieval. These tracks provide a way to measure systems progress in certain fields in text retrieval such as crosslanguage retrieval, retrieval filtering and genomics. We participated in the question answering track. The questions in the TREC-2004 QA track are clustered by target, which is the topic of the question. The QA track for 2004 has three types of questions: factoid questions that require only one correct response, list questions that require a non redundant list of correct responses and other questions that require a non redundant list of facts about the target that has not already been discovered by a previous answer. These questions will be answered using the AQUAINT collection, a collection of over a million newswire documents.