QolA: Fostering Collaboration Within QA

In this paper we suggest a QA pilot task, dubbed QolA, whose joint rationale is allow for collaboration among systems, increase multilinguality and multicollection use, and investigate ways of dealing with different strengths and weaknesses of a population of QA systems. We claim that merging answers, weighting answers, choosing among contradictory answers or generating composite answers, and verifying and validating information, by posing related questions, should be part and parcel of the question answering process. The paper motivates these ideas and suggests a way to foster research in these areas by deploying QA systems as Web services. 1 Motivation There were many reasons that led us to propose QolA in the CLEF 2006 workhop in Alicante [18], which we would like to expand and further motivate here. Some are related to CLEF's ultimate aims as we understand them: namely advance the field of crosslingual IR systems and provide a forum for researchers and developers to cross the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Diana Santos, Luís Costa
• Keywords: CLEF 2006, CLEF 2006 Workhop, Information Management, QA Pilot Task, QA Systems