Overview of the Second Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-2)

In November of 1992 the first Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-1) was held at NIST (Harman 1993). This conference, co-sponsored by ARPA and NIST, brought together information retrieval researchers to discuss their system results on the new TIPSTER test collection. This was the first time that such groups had ever compared results on the same data using the same evaluation methods, and represented a breakthrough in cross-system evaluation in information retrieval. It was also the first time that most of these groups had tackled such a large test collection and required a major effort by all groups to scale up their retrieval techniques.