Overview of the answer validation exercise 2007

Abstract

The Answer Validation Exercise at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum is aimed at developing systems able to decide whether the answer of a Question Answering system is correct or not. We present here the exercise description, the changes in the evaluation methodology with respect to the first edition, and the results of this second edition (AVE 2007). The changes in the evaluation methodology had two objectives: the first one was to quantify the gain in performance when more sophisticated validation modules are introduced in QA systems. The second objective was to bring systems based on Textual Entailment to the Automatic Hypothesis Generation problem which is not part itself of the Recognising Textual Entailment (RTE) task but a need of the Answer Validation setting. 9 groups have participated with 16 runs in 4 different languages. Compared with the QA systems, the results show an evidence of the potential gain that more sophisticated AV modules introduce in the task of QA. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.