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The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) is an on-going series of workshops focusing on a list of different information retrieval (IR) research areas, or tracks. It is co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) center of the U.S. Department of Defense, and began in 1992 as part of the TIPSTER Text program. Its purpose is to support and encourage research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies and to increase the speed of lab-to-product transfer of technology. Each track has a challenge wherein NIST provides participating groups with data sets and test problems. Depending on track, test problems might be questions, topics, or target extractible features. Uniform scoring is performed so the systems can be fairly evaluated. After evaluation of the results, a workshop provides a place for participants to collect together thoughts and ideas and present current and future research work.
Participation The conference is made up a varied, international group of researchers and developers. In 2003, there were 93 groups from both academia and industry from 22 countries participating. Conference Contributions TREC claims that within the first six years of the workshops, the effectiveness of retrieval systems approximately doubled. The conference was also the first to hold large-scale evaluations of non-English documents, speech, video and retrieval across languages. Additionally, the challenges have inspired a large body of publications. Technology first developed in TREC is now included in many of the world's commercial search engines. Tracks New tracks are added as new research needs are identified, this list is current for 2006. Past tracks In 2003, this track became its own independent evaluation named TRECVID. In 1997, a Japanese counterpart of TREC was launched, called NTCIR, and in 2001, a European counterpart was launched, called Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). | ||||||||
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