The Text Retrieval Conferences

There have been two Text REtrieval conferences frRECs); TREC-1 in November 1992, with 28 participants, and TREC-2 in August 1993, with 31 participants. This conference was inspired by the very successful MUC effort, and by the availability of the new large English test collection built for TIPSTER. Whereas an important goal for ARPA was to investigate a broad range of detection (retrieval) techniques, one of the other goals of the conference was to encourage the use of this collection by many experimenters in the information retrieval community. It was hoped that by providing a very large test collection, and encouraging interaction with other groups in a friendly evaluation forum, a new thrust in information retrieval would occur. It was also hoped that increased interaction between commercial and academic groups would result in a transfer of new retrieval techniques into the commercial setting, enabling better products in the long-term for ARIA cfients.