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<Paper uid="W06-1901">
  <Title>QA better than IR ?</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="7" end_page="7" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We described a metrical method to compare Question Answering systems and Information Retrieval engines on a hard disk-based corpus.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Applied to our system Qristal and to the search engine Google Desktop, this method shows that the improvements due to question answering systems, especially in terms of user effort, are both qualitative and quantitative. Taking into account or not the query keying time, the question answering system is 2 to 6 times faster than the Information Retrieval engine.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This evaluation, made almost automatically with the corpus EQueR, focuses mainly on factual or definition types of requests which defines the majority of the requests concerned in the QA system evaluation campaigns. On more complex questions, like those beginning by &amp;quot;comment&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;how...&amp;quot;), the QA systems obtained less satisfying results than for factual questions but, on this type of questions, the search engines like Google proved to be also less accurate. A more exhaustive and thorough study on these types of requests or on questions beginning by &amp;quot;pourquoi&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;why&amp;quot;) would possibly confirm these results, although here only a few questions were of these types.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> At last, a similar metrics and applied evaluation remain to be endeavoured on a web-based corpus despite the entailing difficulties.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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