Call for participation - QAst 2008

[ELDA]

Dear All,

We are pleased to announce the release of the development dataset for 
the CLEF-QA 2008 track “Question Answering on Speech Transcripts” (QAst).
We take this opportunity to launch a first call for participation in 
this evaluation exercise.

QAst is a CLEF-QA track that aims at providing an evaluation framework 
for QA technology on speech transcripts, both manual and automatic.
A detailed description of this track is available at: 
http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~qast <http://www.lsi.upc.edu/%7Eqast>

It is the second evaluation for the QAst track.
Last year (QAst 2007), factual questions had been generated for two 
distinct corpora (in English language only). This year, in addition to 
factual questions,
some definition questions are generated, and five corpora covering three 
different languages are used (3 corpora in English, 1 in Spanish and 1 
in French).

Important dates:

# 15 June 2008: evaluation set released
# 30 June 2008: submission deadline

The pilot track is organized jointly by the Technical University of 
Catalonia (UPC), the Evaluations and Language resources Distribution 
Agency (ELDA) and Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les 
Sciences de l'Ingénieur (LIMSI).

If you are interested in participating please send an email to Jordi 
Turmo (turmo_AT_lsi.upc.edu) with "QAst" in the subject line.

Best regards,

QAst organizers.