CS Graduate Seminar
November 14, 2003
Speaker: Dr. Jim Cowie, Director, Computing Research Laboratory
Title: "What breed was Roy Roger's horse?"
Answering Factoid Questions - An introduction to the TREC Q&A task.
Abstract:
CRL is carrying out research funded through a program called AQAINT on
advanced question answering. This work is very knowledge dependent and
is not well suited to the more general problem of general question
answering which is the current evaluation being pursued by the Text
Retrieval Evaluation Conferences (TREC).
I will describe CRL's work on Q&A briefly and then move on to the TREC
problem. Coming up with a good solution requires language processing,
data (of various kinds), information retrieval on very large datasets,
and a bag of tricks of all kinds. I am hoping to find some volunteers to
attack different aspects of this problem next semester and to take part
in the TREC 2004 Q&A evaluation.