This paper presents two corpora produced within the RPM2 project: a multi-document summarization corpus and a sentence compression corpus. Both corpora are in French. The first one is the only one we know in this language. It contains 20 topics with 20 documents each. A first set of 10 documents per topic is summarized and then the second set is used to produce an update summarization (new information). 4 annotators were involved and produced a total of 160 abstracts. The second corpus contains all the sentences of the first one. 4 annotators were asked to compress the 8432 sentences. This is the biggest corpus of compressed sentences we know, whatever the language. The paper provides some figures in order to compare the different annotators: compression rates, number of tokens per sentence, percentage of tokens kept according to their POS, position of dropped tokens in the sentence compression phase, etc. These figures show important differences from an annotator to the other. Another point is the different strategies of compression used according to the length of the sentence.

This paper presents EASY, which has been the first campaign evaluating syntactic parsers on all the common syntactic phenomena and a large set of dependency relations. The language analyzed was French. During this campaign, an annotation scheme has been elaborated with the different actors: participants and corpus providers; then a corpus made of several syntactic materials has been built and annotated: it reflects a great variety of linguistic styles (from literature to oral transcriptions, and from newspapers to medical texts). Both corpus and annotation scheme are here briefly presented. Moreover, evaluation measures are explained and detailed results are given. The results of the 15 parsers coming from 12 teams are analyzed. To conclude, a first experiment aiming to combine the outputs of the different systems is shown.

In this paper we present the PASSAGE project which aims at building automatically a French Treebank of large size by combining the output of several parsers, using the EASY annotation scheme. We present also the results of the of the first evaluation campaign of the project and the preliminary results we have obtained with our ROVER procedure for combining parsers automatically.

This paper reports on the QAST track of CLEF aiming to evaluate Question Answering on Speech Transcriptions. Accessing information in spoken documents provides additional challenges to those of text-based QA, needing to address the characteristics of spoken language, as well as errors in the case of automatic transcriptions of spontaneous speech. The framework and results of the pilot QAst evaluation held as part of CLEF 2007 is described, illustrating some of the additional challenges posed by QA in spoken documents relative to written ones. The current plans for future multiple-language and multiple-task QAst evaluations are described.

Dans cet article, nous présentons les résultats de la campagne d’évaluation EASY des analyseurs syntaxiques du français. EASY a été la toute première campagne d’évaluation comparative des analyseurs syntaxiques du français en mode boîte noire utilisant des mesures objectives quantitatives. EASY fait partie du programme TECHNOLANGUE du Ministère délégué à la Recherche et à l’Éducation, avec le soutien du ministère de délégué à l’industrie et du ministère de la culture et de la communication. Nous exposons tout d’abord la position de la campagne par rapport aux autres projets d’évaluation en analyse syntaxique, puis nous présentos son déroulement, et donnons les résultats des 15 analyseurs participants en fonction des différents types de corpus et des différentes annotations (constituants et relations). Nous proposons ensuite un ensemble de leçons à tirer de cette campagne, en particulier à propos du protocole d’évaluation, de la définition de la segmentation en unités linguistiques, du formalisme et des activités d’annotation, des critères de qualité des données, des annotations et des résultats, et finalement de la notion de référence en analyse syntaxique. Nous concluons en présentant comment les résultats d’EASY se prolongent dans le projet PASSAGE (ANR-06-MDCA-013) qui vient de débuter et dont l’objectif est d’étiqueter un grand corpus par plusieurs analyseurs en les combinant selon des paramètres issus de l’évaluation.

This paper presents the protocol of EASY the evaluation campaign for syntactic parsers of French in the EVALDA project of the TECHNOLANGUE program. We describe the participants, the corpus and its genre partitioning, the annotation scheme, which allows for the annotation of both constituents and relations, the evaluation methodology and, as an illustration, the results obtained by one participant on half of the corpus.

The aim of the Media-Evalda project is to evaluate the understanding capabilities of dialog systems. This paper presents the Media protocol for speech understanding evaluation and describes the results of the June 2005 literal evaluation campaign. Five systems, both symbolic or corpus-based, participated to the evaluation which is based on a common semantic representation. Different scorings have been performed on the system results. The understanding error rate, for the Full scoring is, depending on the systems, from 29% to 41.3%. A diagnosis analysis of these results is proposed.

This paper describes the EQueR-EVALDA Evaluation Campaign, the French evaluation campaign of Question-Answering (QA) systems. The EQueR Evaluation Campaign included two tasks of automatic answer retrieval: the first one was a QA task over a heterogeneous collection of texts - mainly newspaper articles, and the second one a specialised one in the Medical field over a corpus of medical texts. In total, seven groups participated in the General task and five groups participated in the Medical task. For the General task, the best system obtained 81.46% of correct answers during the evalaution of the passages, while it obtained 67.24% during the evaluation of the short answers. We describe herein the specifications, the corpora, the evaluation, the phase of judgment of results, the scoring phase and the results for the two different types of evaluation.

This paper presents an overview of the Multilingual Question Answering evaluation campaigns which have been organized at CLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) since 2003. Over the years, the competition has registered a steady increment in the number of participants and languages involved. In fact, from the original eight groups which participated in 2003 QA track, the number of competitors in 2005 rose to twenty-four. Also, the performances of the systems have steadily improved, and the average of the best performances in the 2005 saw an increase of 10% with respect to the previous year.