The multilingual question answering track at CLEF

This paper presents an overview of the Multilingual Question Answering evaluation campaigns which have been organized at CLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) since 2003. Over the years, the competition has registered a steady increment in the number of participants and languages involved. In fact, from the original eight groups which participated in 2003 QA track, the number of competitors in 2005 rose to twenty-four. Also, the performances of the systems have steadily improved, and the average of the best performances in the 2005 saw an increase of 10% with respect to the previous year. This report describes the task in general and, in more detail, the methodology used for preparing the data-sets as well as the resources available for training systems. The approaches and results achieved by participating groups are also briefly discussed.