Welcome to WiQA, the Question Answering using Wikipedia pilot that will be launched at CLEF 2006. At this time, December 2005, the defintion of the pilot task has been frozen. Please sign up for the mailing list or head to the WiQA wiki to contribute.
The idea to organize a QA using Wikipedia pilot builds on several motivations:
- Traditionally, people turn to reference works to get answers to their questions. Wikipedia has become one of the largest reference works ever, making it a natural target for question answering systems.
- Wikipedia is a rich mixture of text, link structure, navigational aids, categories,..., making it extremely appealing for text mining and link analysis work.
- Wikipedia is a great resource. It is something we want to work with, and contribute to, both by facilitating access to it, and,as the distinction between readers and authors has become blurred, by creating tools to support the authoring process.
For the WiQA pilot at CLEF 2006, we are interested in the following:
- to experiment with information extraction/retrieval/processing techniques on the Wikipedia corpus with a rich semi-defined structure
- to identify interesting and natural information access tasks for this corpus, catering for both readers and authors.
Going beyond the pilot, our overall aim with question answering using Wikipedia is to provide real users with focussed and flexible ways of accessing the information in Wikipedia
Over the next few months, these pages should gradually be filled in with results and decision of the discussions that are taking place on the WiQA mailing list and/or on the WiQA wiki.