Abstract

    This report constitutes the proceedings of the first Text REtrieval Conference (TRBC-1) held in
Gaithersburg, Maryland, November 4-6, 1992. The conference was co-sponsored by the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NI~ and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and was
attended by 92 people involved in the 25 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 large variety of retrieval techniques reported on, including methods using
automatic thesauri, sophisticated term weighting, natural language techniques, relevance feedback, and
advanced pattern matching. Because results had been run through a common evaluation package, groups were
able to compare the effectiveness of different techniques, and discuss how differences among the systems
affected performance.

    The conference included paper sessions and six discussions groups. This proceedings includes papers
from all participants, including the poster sessions, and papers from the panel, along with reports from some
of the discussions groups.


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