We introduce TECHQA, a domain-adaptation question answering dataset for the technical support domain. The TECHQA corpus highlights two real-world issues from the automated customer support domain. First, it contains actual questions posed by users on a technical forum, rather than questions generated specifically for a competition or a task. Second, it has a real-world size – 600 training, 310 dev, and 490 evaluation question/answer pairs – thus reflecting the cost of creating large labeled datasets with actual data. Hence, TECHQA is meant to stimulate research in domain adaptation rather than as a resource to build QA systems from scratch. TECHQA was obtained by crawling the IBMDeveloper and DeveloperWorks forums for questions with accepted answers provided in an IBM Technote—a technical document that addresses a specific technical issue. We also release a collection of the 801,998 Technotes available on the web as of April 4, 2019 as a companion resource that can be used to learn representations of the IT domain language.

We describe a statistical algorithm for machine translation intended to provide translations of large document collections at speeds far in excess of traditional machine translation systems, and of sufficiently high quality to perform information retrieval on the translated document collections. The model is trained from a parallel corpus and is capable of disambiguating senses of words. Information retrieval (IR) experiments on a French language dataset from a recent cross-language information retrieval evaluation yields results superior to those obtained by participants in the evaluation, and confirm the importance of word sense disambiugation in cross-language information retrieval.