Evaluation of Restricted Domain Question-Answering Systems
Document Type
Conference Paper
Journal/Book Title/Conference
42nd Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Publication Date
2004
Abstract
Question-Answering (QA) evaluation efforts have largely been tailored to open-domain systems. The TREC QA test collections contain newswire articles and the accompanying queries cover a wide variety of topics. While some apprehension about the limitations of restricted- domain systems is no doubt justified, the strict promotion of unlimited domain QA evaluations may have some unintended consequences. Simply applying the open domain QA evaluation paradigm to a restricted-domain system poses problems in the areas of test question development, answer key creation, and test collection construction. This paper examines the evaluation requirements of restricted domain systems. It incorporates evaluation criteria identified by users of an operational QA system in the aerospace engineering domain. While the paper demonstrates that user-centered task-based evaluations are required for restricted domain systems, these evaluations are found to be equally applicable to open domain systems.
Recommended Citation
Diekema, A.R., Yilmazel, O., Liddy, E.D. Evaluation of Restricted Domain Question-Answering Systems. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Workshop for Question Answering in Restricted Domains. Barcelona, Spain, July 25th, 2004.
Comments
Originally published by the Association for Computational Linguistics. PDF preview and download available through remote link.