The TREC experiments and their impact on Europe

Information retrieval (IR) research on text collections has concentrated on improving the effectiveness of the indexing and retrieval operations. For the most part, the evaluation of IR systems has been carried out on relatively small collections of documents, queries and relevance assessments. In 1992 the first of a series of evaluation exercises called TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) was launched in the US and these exercises have continued annually since then. What makes TREC notable in IR research is that the document collections used are huge compared to previous ones and the groups participating in this collaborative evaluation represent a who is who of IR research across the world. In this paper we present an overview of TREC, the way it operates and the specialist “tracks” it supports. We then concentrate on European involvement in TREC, examining the participants and the emergence of European TREC-like exercises.