IBM Research Activities at TREC

Several groups in IBM’s Research Division have participated in TREC, with differing goals. This chapter summarizes some of their activities and the conclusions they reached. It should be emphasized that there was no central plan in these activities – individual groups decided to participate in the way that made sense to them at the time. In effect, participation in TREC was a tool they used to further their diverse research agendas. In some cases, groups participated once or twice in order to explore some issue; in other cases, regular participation in certain TREC tracks has been a central component of a group’s research agenda. In this chapter we will first describe IBM Research’s participation in the TREC tracks most relevant to the classic document retrieval task, and in the tracks related to user interfaces for search and crosslanguage document retrieval. Then we will outline the extensive series of submissions made to the Question Answering track, and finally discuss IBM Research’s activities in multimedia retrieval at TREC.