Abstract


  This report constitutes the prooeedihgs of the seeond Text REtrieval Conference C[REC-2) held in Gaithers-
burg, Maryland, August 31-September 2, 1993. The conference was co-sponsored by the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and was attended by
150 people involved in the 31 participating groups.
  The goal of the conference was to bring research groups together to discuss their work on a new large test
collection.  There was a wide variation of retrieval techniques reported on, including methods using automatic
thesauiii9 sophisticated term weighting, natural language techniques, relevance feedback, and advanced pattern
matching.   As results had been run through a common evaluation package, groups were able to compare the
effectiveness of different techniques, and discuss how differences between the systems affected performance.
  The conference included paper sessions and discussion groups. This proceedings includes papers from most
of the participants (several poster groups did not submit papers), along with reports from soine of the discussion
groups.


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