Creating the DISEQuA Corpus: A Test Set for Multilingual Question Answering

This paper describes the procedure adopted by the three coordinators of the CLEF 2003 question answering track (ITC-irst, UNED and ILLC) to create the question set for the monolingual tasks. Despite the few resources available, the three groups managed to formulate and verify a large pool of original questions in three different languages: Dutch, Italian and Spanish. Part of these queries was translated into English and shared between the three coordinating groups. A second cross-verification was then conducted in order to identify the queries that had an answer in all three monolingual document collections. The result of the joint efforts was the creation of the DISEQuA (Dutch Italian Spanish English Questions and Answers) corpus, a useful and reusable resource that is freely available for the research community. We report on the different stages of the corpus creation, from the monolingual kernels to the multilingual extension.

Authors and Affiliations

1. ITC-irst, Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Via Sommarive, 38050, Povo (TN), Italy

   Bernardo Magnini, Simone Romagnoli & Alessandro Vallin

2. Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informaticos, UNED, Spanish Distance Learning University, Ciudad Universitaria, c./Juan del Rosal 16, 28040, Madrid, Spain

   Jesús Herrera, Anselmo Peñas, Víctor Peinado & Felisa Verdejo

3. Language and Inference Technology Group, ILLC, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

   Maarten de Rijke

Editors and Affiliations

1. ISTI-CNR, Area di Ricerca, Pisa, Italy

   Carol Peters

2. No Affiliations,  

   Julio Gonzalo  & Martin Braschler  & 

3. German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), Ludwigkirchplatz 3-4, 10719, Berlin, Germany

   Michael Kluck

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