How to Evaluate your Question Answering System Every Day and Still Get Real Work Done

TL;DR

This paper introduces Qaviar, an automated evaluation system for question answering that correlates highly with human judgment, enabling daily system assessment without extensive manual effort.

Contribution

Qaviar provides a reliable, automatic measure of answer correctness that closely matches human evaluations, facilitating efficient daily QA system assessment.

Findings

Qaviar achieves 93-95% agreement with human judgments.

System rankings by Qaviar correlate with human rankings at 0.920 Kendall's Tau.

Qaviar enables rapid, automated QA evaluation suitable for daily use.

Abstract

In this paper, we report on Qaviar, an experimental automated evaluation system for question answering applications. The goal of our research was to find an automatically calculated measure that correlates well with human judges' assessment of answer correctness in the context of question answering tasks. Qaviar judges the response by computing recall against the stemmed content words in the human-generated answer key. It counts the answer correct if it exceeds agiven recall threshold. We determined that the answer correctness predicted by Qaviar agreed with the human 93% to 95% of the time. 41 question-answering systems were ranked by both Qaviar and human assessors, and these rankings correlated with a Kendall's Tau measure of 0.920, compared to a correlation of 0.956 between human assessors on the same data.