Norman Heino


2014

pdf
A tool suite for creating question answering benchmarks
Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo | Norman Heino | René Speck | Prodromos Malakasiotis
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

We introduce the BIOASQ suite, a set of open-source Web tools for the creation, assessment and community-driven improvement of question answering benchmarks. The suite comprises three main tools: (1) the annotation tool supports the creation of benchmarks per se. In particular, this tool allows a team of experts to create questions and answers as well as to annotate the latter with documents, document snippets, RDF triples and ontology concepts. While the creation of questions is supported by different views and contextual information pertaining to the same question, the creation of answers is supported by the integration of several search engines and context information to facilitate the retrieval of the said answers as well as their annotation. (2) The assessment tool allows comparing several answers to the same question. Therewith, it can be used to assess the inter-annotator agreement as well as to manually evaluate automatically generated answers. (3) The third tool in the suite, the social network, aims to ensure the sustainability and iterative improvement of the benchmark by empowering communities of experts to provide insights on the questions in the benchmark. The BIOASQ suite has already been used successfully to create the 311 questions comprised in the BIOASQ question answering benchmark. It has also been evaluated by the experts who used it to create the BIOASQ benchmark.