The Text REtrieval Conferences (TRECs) and the Cross-Language Track

The Text REtrieval Conferences (TRECs) are a series of workshops that encourage research in information retrieval from realistic applications by providing large test collections, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing results. The first workshop was held in November, 1992, and workshops (following evaluations) have been held yearly since then. In addition to the main task, six additional subtasks, called "tracks" allow participants to focus on particular common subproblems in retrieval, such as retrieval across languages, retrieval of speech, and retrieval at high levels of accuracy. TREC is co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Information Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).