Component-Based Evaluation for Question Answering

This chapter describes the component-based evaluation of automatic question answering (QA) systems, which was pioneered in the NTCIR-7 ACLIA challenge and has became a fundamental part of QA system development, especially for difficult real-world datasets which require a multi-strategy, multi-component approach. We summarize the history of component evaluation for QA and describe more recent work at Carnegie Mellon (on TREC Genomics, BioASQ, and LiveQA datasets) which has descended directly from our experiences in NTCIR.