DUC 2006

Motivating application: See DUC 2006. The system task for DUC 2006 will be to model real-world complex question answering, in which an information need cannot be satisfied by simply stating a name, date, quantity, etc. Given a topic (question) and a set of 25 relevant documents, the task is to synthesize a fluent, well-organized 250-word summary of the documents that answers the question(s) in the topic statement. Successful performance on the task benefits from a combination of IR and NLP capabilities, including passage retrieval, compression, and fusion of information.
NIST has test data available here. (You will need to fill out of a form to request access to the data).
Approaches taken by various teams are detailed here.