Overview of the NTCIR-11 QA-Lab Task

This paper describes an overview of the first QA Lab (Question Answering Lab for Entrance Exam) task at NTCIR 11. The goal of the QA lab is to provide a module-based platform for advanced question answering systems and comparative evaluation for solving real-world university entrance exam questions. In this task, “world history” questions are selected from The National Center Test for University Admissions and from the secondary exams at 5 universities in Japan. This paper also describes the used data, baseline systems, formal run results, the characteristic aspects of the participating groups’ systems and their contribution.