Quasar

Datasets accompanying the paper Quasar: Datasets for QA by Search and Reading.

Download

Both Quasar-S and Quasar-T are available for download here. See the accompanying readme.txt for a description of the included files. The release includes:

1. Question sets for train / test / dev splits.
2. Short- and Long-pseudodocuments retrieved by the system described in the paper.
3. For Quasar-S, an overall list of candidates to which all answers belong.
4. For Quasar-T, separate lists of noun phrases extracted from the contexts of each question.
5. Annotations of subset of dev set questions, as described in the paper.

The background corpus for Quasar-S can be downloaded from here (via the SO Scrape link at the bottom). The background corpus for Quasar-T is the ClueWeb09 dataset which you can access here.

An implementation of the F1 and EM evaluation metrics for Quasar-T is included in metric.py.

Explore the Datasets

Below you can find links to the web interface used for evaluating human performance and collecting annotations. This includes an interactive quiz in which the questions are presented one by one, and a search engine for querying the background corpus which you can use in a separate window. Please note that any answers and annotations you enter will be recorded!

Quasar-S: Quiz | Search Engine

Quasar-T: Quiz | Search Engine

The search engine used here is Solr, which uses a Lucene backend similar to the search phase described in the paper. The corpus in each case is the set of short pseudodocuments (sentences) pooled across all queries for that corpus, with no query identifiers or tag filtering. This is just a bare-bones search engine guaranteed not to yield the exact source sentence for the question (as you'd get by just using Google).

Citation

If you use these datasets please cite the following:

@article{dhingra2017quasar,
  title={Quasar: Datasets for Question Answering by Search and Reading},
  author={Dhingra, Bhuwan and Mazaitis, Kathryn and Cohen, William W},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.03904},
  year={2017}
}