This paper describes the main challenges of multilingual question answering. In particular, it focuses on the problem of answer fusion, which concerns the combination of answers obtained from collections in different languages. Basically, it compares a set of techniques for answer fusion, previously used in other multilingual tasks, in the problem of multilingual question answering. On the basi...

We provide an analysis of best answers (as chosen by questioners) on Yahoo Answers, a popular online Q&A site with millions of monthly contributors. Our analysis is done mainly through the lens of prediction: we compile a dataset that is as large and fine-grained as any considered before, generate features across a range of different classes, and build a classifier to predict which answers will...

"Witkeys" are websites in China that form a rapidly growing web-based knowledge market. A user who posts a task also offers a small fee, and many other users submit their answers to compete. The Witkey sites fall in-between aspects of the now-defunct Google Answers (vetted experts answer questions for a fee) and Yahoo Answers (anyone can answer or ask a question). As such, these sites promise n...

How do users of music information retrieval (MIR) systems express their needs? Using a Wizard of Oz approach to system evaluation, combined with a grounded theory analysis of 502 real-world music queries posted to Google Answers, this paper addresses this pivotal question.