Human question answering performance using an interactive document retrieval system

Every day, people answer their questions by using document retrieval systems. Compared to document retrieval systems, question answering (QA) systems aim to speed the rate at which users find answers by retrieving answers rather than documents. To better understand how document retrieval systems compare to QA systems, we measured the performance of humans using an interactive document retrieval system to answer questions. We first measured the ability of users to answer their questions using an interactive document retrieval system, and then compared the users' performance with the document retrieval system to question answering systems. We found that while users can successfully answer their questions using a document retrieval system, question answering systems have the potential to significantly increase the rate at which users find answers.