The Query Track in TREC-8 is a bit different from all the other tracks. It is a cooperative effort among the participating groups to look at the issue of “query variability.” The evaluation averages presented in a typical system evaluation task, such as the TREC Ad-Hoc Task, conceal a tremendous variability of system performance across topics/queries. No system can possibly perform equally well...

In this paper, we document our efforts to extend our statistical question answering system for TREC-11. We incorporated a web search feature, and novel extensions of statistical machine translation as well as extracting lexical patterns for exact answers from a supervised corpus. Without modification to our base set of thirty-one categories, we were able to achieve a confidence weighted score o...

AnswerFinder has been completely redesigned for TREC 2005. The new architecture allows a fast development of question-answering systems for their deployment in the TREC tasks and other applications. The AnswerFinder modules use XML to express the services they provide, and they can be queried with XML for their services. The QA method now incorporates graphbased methods to compute the answerhoo...

T-cell receptor excision circles (TREC) in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) were evaluated in the Genetic Resistance to Human Immunodeficiency Virus cohort of HIV-1-seropositive non-progressors (NP). After a short follow-up, NP were sub-grouped as stable (NP-S), or with signs of disease progression (NP-P). Initial TREC were higher in NP-S compared to NP-P ( P = 0.002), even after adjus...

A technique is described for aligning TREC topic descriptions that is capable of producing a small multilingual test collection which can be used for cross language ad hoc and routing evaluations Meth ods for measuring the degree of degradation induced by the necessary approximations are described and illustrated using examples from an evaluation of two cross language routing techniques Althoug...

To investigate the thymic contribution to immune reconstitution during antiretroviral therapy (ART), T cell receptor gene rearrangement excision circles (TRECs) were measured in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) and CD4 cells from 33 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 1-infected children monitored for 96 weeks after ART initiation. Baseline TREC levels were associated positively wi...

The origin of T cells after highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV-1) is now under discussion. The possibility of renewed lymphopoiesis in aged thymuses is still controversial. In this work we combine the analysis of naïve T cells, T-cell receptor excision circles (TRECs), and computed tomography scanning of thymic tissue to fu...

The paper reviews the TREC Programme up to TREC-6 (1997), considering the test results, the substantive ®ndings for IR that follow and the lessons TREC o€ers for IR evaluation. The paper focuses on the ad hoc retrieval task, with discussion of other test tracks as appropriate. The paper summarises the structure of the TREC work and analyses the experimental data in some detail. The analysis of ...

The goal of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) is to provide a setting for large-scale testing of text retrieval technology (Voorhees & Harman, 2000). TREC is organized as a workshop series that is based on realistic test collections, uniform and appropriate evaluation procedures, and a forum for the exchange of research ideas and discussion of research methodology (see trec. nist.gov). Most ...

This paper summarizes our efforts on TREC 2017 Precision Medicine Track. We present a genetic programming based learning-to-rank algorithm. We perform two training experiments on 2014 and 2016 TREC CDS data and apply the pre-trained model as re-ranking method to improve the performance. In addition, two utility functions, CHK and FFP4, have been used for the training optimization.