Evidence finding using a collection of books

This paper introduces the task of Evidence Finding, a novel information retrieval task that uses books - a traditionally more trust-worthy source of information - to help provide evidence to support a statement. What makes this evidence-finding task different from other tasks, such as the related INEX Prove It task, is that both the statement for which evidence is sought and its context are given to the search system. A practical application of this system is to provide supporting or refuting evidence from books for a statement made within a Wikipedia article, using the entire article as contextual support for query generation. We provide details of this task as well as an analysis of a number of retrieval methods that address this task.