Preface

   This report constitutes the proceedings of the first Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-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 conference was the first in an on-going
series of workshops to evaluate new technologies in text retrieval.

   The workshop included plenary sessions and six discussion groups. Because the participants in the
workshop drew on their personal experiences, they sometimes cited specific vendors and commercial products.
The inclusion or omission of a particular company or product does not imply either endorsement or criticism
by NIST.

   The sponsorship of the Software and Intelligent Systems Technology Office of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency is gratefully acknowledged, along with the tremendous work of the program
committee.


Donna Harman
February 20, 1993


                       TREC-1 Program Committee

                       Donna Harman, NIST, Chair
                       Ed Addison, ConQuest, Inc.
                       Chris Buckley, Cornell University
                       Darryl Howard, U.S. Department of Defense
                       David Lewis, AT&T Bell Labs
                       Jan Pedersen, Xerox Parc
                       John Prange, U.S. Department of Defense
                       Alan Smeaton, Dublin City University, Ireland
                       Richard Tong, Advanced Decision Systems


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