MITRE
 
About Us Our Work Employment News & Events
MITRE Remote Access for MITRE Employees Site Map
Home > Our Work > Technical Papers >

How to Evaluate Your Question Answering System Every Day—and Still Get Real Work Done

April 2000

Eric J. Breck, The MITRE Corporation
John D. Burger, The MITRE Corporation
Lisa Ferro, The MITRE Corporation
Lynette Hirschman, The MITRE Corporation
David House, The MITRE Corporation
Marc Light, The MITRE Corporation
Inderjeet Mani, The MITRE Corporation

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we report on Qaviar, an experimental automated evaluation system for question answering applications. The goal of our research was to find an automatically calculated measure that correlates well with human judges' assessment of answer correctness in the context of question answering tasks. Qaviar judges the response by computing recall against the stemmed content words in the human-generated answer key. It counts the answer correct if it exceeds a given recall threshold. We determined that the answer correctness predicted by Qaviar agreed with the human 93% to 95% of the time. 41 question-answering systems were ranked by both Qaviar and human assessors, and these rankings correlated with a Kendall's Tau measure of 0.920, compared to a correlation of 0.956 between human assessors on the same data.

» Download Paper [PDF, 77KB]

Additional Search Keywords

N/A

Page last updated: April 28, 2000   |   Top of page

Homeland Security Center Center for Enterprise Modernization Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence Center Center for Advanced Aviation System Development

 
 
 

Serving as Architects of Information Advantage.™
Copyright © 1997-2008, The MITRE Corporation. All rights reserved.
MITRE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation.
Material on this site may be copied and distributed with permission only.

 

Privacy Policy | Contact Us

Boston Business Journal Best Places to Work 2007 Computerworld Best Places to Work in IT 2005-2007 Fortune 100 Best Places to Work 2002-2008