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<Paper uid="W06-1901">
  <Title>QA better than IR ?</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Asking questions in natural language and obtain short answers (if possible the exact answer) make QA systems the paramount of Information Retrieval.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Through TREC and CLEF international campaigns, Question Answering systems are evaluated both in monolingual and multilingual use (e.g. Voorhees, 2005; Vallin, 2005).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Nevertheless, very few comparisons of performances took place between Question Answering systems and Information Retrieval engines (Kwok, 2001; Radev, 2002; Buccholz, 2002; McGowan, 2005). If so, they mainly focus on the quality of the supplied answers and on the time for user to obtain the answer.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> We hereby attempt to define an evaluation method to compare performances and user-friendliness of both Question Answering systems and Information Retrieval engines. We will apply this method to our system Qristal and to the Google Desktop Search1 engine..</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>