Overview of the WiQA Task at CLEF 2006

We describe WiQA 2006, a pilot task aimed at studying question answering using Wikipedia. Going beyond traditional factoid questions, the task considered at WiQA 2006 was to return--given an source page from Wikipedia--to identify snippets from other Wikipedia pages, possibly in languages different from the language of the source page, that add new and important information to the source page, and that do so without repetition. A total of 7 teams took part, submitting 20 runs. Our main findings are two-fold: (i) while challenging, the tasks considered at WiQA are do-able as participants achieved impressive scores as measured in terms of yield, mean reciprocal rank, and precision, (ii) on the bilingual task, substantially higher scores were achieved than on the monolingual tasks.