EQueR: the French Evaluation campaign of Question-Answering Systems

AbstractThis paper describes the EQueR-EVALDA Evaluation Campaign, the French evaluation campaign of Question-Answering (QA) systems. The EQueR Evaluation Campaign included two tasks of automatic answer retrieval: the first one was a QA task over a heterogeneous collection of texts - mainly newspaper articles, and the second one a specialised one in the Medical field over a corpus of medical texts. In total, seven groups participated in the General task and five groups participated in the Medical task. For the General task, the best system obtained 81.46% of correct answers during the evalaution of the passages, while it obtained 67.24% during the evaluation of the short answers. We describe herein the specifications, the corpora, the evaluation, the phase of judgment of results, the scoring phase and the results for the two different types of evaluation.