Evaluation Protocol and Tools for Question-Answering on Speech Transcripts

Nicolas Moreau, Olivier Hamon, Djamel Mostefa, Sophie Rosset, Olivier Galibert, Lori Lamel, Jordi Turmo, Pere R. Comas, Paolo Rosso, Davide Buscaldi, Khalid Choukri


Abstract
Question Answering (QA) technology aims at providing relevant answers to natural language questions. Most Question Answering research has focused on mining document collections containing written texts to answer written questions. In addition to written sources, a large (and growing) amount of potentially interesting information appears in spoken documents, such as broadcast news, speeches, seminars, meetings or telephone conversations. The QAST track (Question-Answering on Speech Transcripts) was introduced in CLEF to investigate the problem of question answering in such audio documents. This paper describes in detail the evaluation protocol and tools designed and developed for the CLEF-QAST evaluation campaigns that have taken place between 2007 and 2009. We first remind the data, question sets, and submission procedures that were produced or set up during these three campaigns. As for the evaluation procedure, the interface that was developed to ease the assessors’ work is described. In addition, this paper introduces a methodology for a semi-automatic evaluation of QAST systems based on time slot comparisons. Finally, the QAST Evaluation Package 2007-2009 resulting from these evaluation campaigns is also introduced.
Anthology ID:
L10-1254
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/372_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nicolas Moreau, Olivier Hamon, Djamel Mostefa, Sophie Rosset, Olivier Galibert, Lori Lamel, Jordi Turmo, Pere R. Comas, Paolo Rosso, Davide Buscaldi, and Khalid Choukri. 2010. Evaluation Protocol and Tools for Question-Answering on Speech Transcripts. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Evaluation Protocol and Tools for Question-Answering on Speech Transcripts (Moreau et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/372_Paper.pdf