The Factoid Queries Collection

Ido Guy, Dan Pelleg

Abstract: We present a collection of over 15,000 queries, issued to commercial web search engines, whose answer is a single fact. The collection was produced based on queries landing on questions within a large community question answering website, each with a best answer no longer than 3 words and an explicit reference to a Wikipedia page. We describe the collection generation process and provide a variety of descriptive characteristics, demonstrating the collection?s uniqueness compared to existing datasets and its potential use for research of factoid question answering and retrieval.