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Annotation of Nuggets and Relevance in GALE Distillation Evaluation

This paper presents an approach to annotation that BAE Systems has employed in the DARPA GALE Phase 2 Distillation evaluation. The purpose of the GALE Distillation evaluation is to quantify the amount of relevant and non-redundant information a distillation engine is able to produce in response to a specific, formatted query; and to compare that amount of information to the amount of information gathered by a bilingual human using commonly available state-of-the-art tools. As part of the evaluation, following NIST evaluation methodology of complex question answering (Voorhees, 2003), human annotators were asked to establish the relevancy of responses as well as the presence of atomic facts or information units, called nuggets of information. This paper discusses various challenges to the annotation of nuggets, called nuggetization, which include interaction between the granularity of nuggets and relevancy of these nuggets to the query in question. The approach proposed in the paper views nuggetization as a procedural task and allows annotators to revisit nuggetization based on the requirements imposed by the relevancy guidelines defined with a specific end-user in mind. This approach is shown in the paper to produce consistent annotations with high inter-annotator agreement scores.