Trec LiveQA Track 2016

The automated question answering (QA) track, which has been one of the most popular tracks in TREC for many years, has focused on the task of providing automatic answers for human questions. The track primarily dealt with factual questions, and the answers provided by participants were extracted from a corpus of News articles. While the task evolved to model increasingly realistic information needs, addressing question series, list questions, and even interactive feedback, a major limitation remained: the questions did not directly come from real users, in real time.

This track revives and expands the QA track, focusing on "live" question answering for real-user questions. Real user questions, extracted from the stream of most recent questions submitted on the Yahoo Answers (YA) site that have not yet been answered by humans, will be sent to the participant systems. The systems will provide an answer in real time. The returned answers will be later judged by TREC editors on a 5-level Likert scale.

Interested teams should officially register to participate on the TREC website (http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/call2016.html ) by February 25, 2016. This is required in order to obtain access to the TREC active participants’ website.