Question Answering on Speech Transcriptions: the QAST evaluation in CLEF

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008)

Abstract

This paper reports on the QAST track of CLEF aiming to evaluate Question Answering on Speech Transcriptions. Accessing information in spoken documents provides additional challenges to those of text-based QA, needing to address the characteristics of spoken language, as well as errors in the case of automatic transcriptions of spontaneous speech. The framework and results of the pilot QAst evaluation held as part of CLEF 2007 is described, illustrating some of the additional challenges posed by QA in spoken documents relative to written ones. The current plans for future multiple-language and multiple-task QAst evaluations are described.