Persuasive, authorative and topical answers for complex question answering

The ciqa track investigates the role of interaction in answering complex questions: questions that relate two or more entities by some specified relationship. As in the ciqa 2006, our interest in ciqa 2007 was on contextual factors that may affect how answers are assessed. In ciqa 2006 we investigated factors such as topical knowledge or confidence in assessing answers through direct questioning – asking the ciqa assessors to directly estimate values for such variables using ordinal or categorical scales. In ciqa 2006 we found many useful relationships between personal contextual variables and how assessors judged answers. This year we were keen to follow this line of investigation, following a more specific research question: how do contextual variables affect the judgement of different types of information surrogate.