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The TREC-8 Question Answering Track Report

Published

Author(s)

Ellen M. Voorhees

Abstract

The TREC-8 Question Answering track was the first large-scale evaluationof domain-independent question answering systems.This paper summarizes the results of the track by giving a briefoverview of the different approaches taken to solve the problem.The most accurate systems found a correct response for more than 2/3of the questions.Relatively simple bag-of-words approaches were adequate for findinganswers when responses could be as long as a paragraph (250 bytes),but more sophisticated processing was necessary for more directresponses (50 bytes).
Citation
The TREC-8 Question Answering Track Report

Keywords

natural language processing, question answering, TREC

Citation

Voorhees, E. (2000), The TREC-8 Question Answering Track Report, The TREC-8 Question Answering Track Report, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=151495 (Accessed October 14, 2025)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact [email protected].

Created December 11, 2000, Updated February 17, 2017
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