The BETTER Cross-Language Information Retrieval Datasets

The IARPA BETTER (Better Extraction from Text Through Enhanced Retrieval) program held three evaluations of information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE). For both tasks, the only training data available was in English, but systems had to perform cross-language retrieval and extraction from Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Russian, and Korean. Pooled assessment and information extraction annotation were used to create reusable IR test collections. These datasets are freely available to researchers working in cross-language retrieval, information extraction, or the conjunction of IR and IE. This paper describes the datasets, how they were constructed, and how they might be used by researchers.