T R E C - 8   I n t e r a c t i v e   T r a c k   H o m e   P a g e

The TExt Retrival Conference (TREC)

The TREC conference series is sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with additional support from other U.S. government agencies. The goal of the conference series is to encourage research in information retrieval from large text applications by providing a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. Attendance at TREC conferences is restricted to those researchers and developers who have performed the TREC retrieval tasks and to selected government personnel.

TREC Tasks and Tracks

TREC has two main tasks, ad hoc retrieval and filtering. The ad hoc task investigates the performance of systems that search a static set of documents using novel topics; the filtering task investigates the performance of systems that use standing queries to search new streams of documents. In addition, TREC has smaller "tracks" that allow participants to focus on particular subproblems of the retrieval task.

TREC Interactive Track

The high-level goal of the Interactive Track is the investigation of searching as an interactive task by examining the process as well as the outcome. The remainder of this page comprises information basic to the definition of the track for TREC-8. For additional information about TREC and its schedules see the TREC homepage.

TREC-8 Interactive Track

• Instances identified by NIST assessors
• Mapping of instances to documents
• Per-search measures

• CSIRO/Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
• Oregon Health Sciences University
• Rutgers University
• University of California at Berkeley
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• University of Sheffield

Interactive Track History