| Overview of the TREC 2003 Question Answering Track (2003) | |||||||||||||||
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| The TREC 2003 question answering track contained two tasks, the passages task and the main task. In the passages task, systems returned a single text snippet in response to factoid questions; the evaluation metric was the number of snippets that contained a correct answer. The main task contained three separate types of questions, factoid questions, list questions, and definition questions. Each of the questions was tagged as to its type and the different question types were evaluated separately. The final score for a main task run was a combination of the scores for the separate question types. This paper defines the various tasks included in the track and reports the evaluation results. Since the TREC 2003 track was the first time for significant participation in the definition and list subtasks, the paper also examines the reliability of the evaluation for these tasks. TREC introduced the first question answering (QA) track in TREC-8 (1999). The goal of the track is to foster research on systems that retrieve answers rather than documents in response to a question, with particular emphasis on systems that can function in unrestricted domains. The tasks in the track have evolved over the years to focus research on particular aspects of the problem deemed important to improving the state-of-the-art. The task in the original QA tracks required systems to return text snippets drawn from a large corpus of newspaper | |||||||||||||||
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