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<Paper uid="W00-0106">
  <Title>Analyzing the Reading Comprehension Task</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Recently there has been a spate of activity for building question-answering systems (QA systems) driven largely by the recently organized QA track at the Eighth Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-8) (Harman, 1999). This increase in research activity has also fueled research in a related area: building Reading Comprehension systems (Hirschman and others, 1999). But while a number of successful systems have been developed for each of these tasks, little, if any, work has been done on analyzing the complexities of the tasks themselves. In this paper we describe a method of classifying facts (information) into categories or levels; where each level signifies a different degree of difficulty of extracting a fact from a piece of text containing it. We then proceed to show how one can use this model the analyze the complexity of the reading comprehension task. Finally, we analyze five different reading comprehension tasks and present results from this analysis.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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