The Text REtrieval Conference is a workshop series designed to encourage research on text retrieval for realistic applications by providing large test collections, uniform scoring procedures and a forum for organizations interested in comparing results. TREC contains two main retrieval tasks plus optional subtasks that allow participants to focus on particular common subproblems in retrieval. The emphasis on individual experiments evaluated in a common setting has proven to be very successful. In the six years since the beginning of TREC, the state of the art in retrieval eectiveness has approximately doubled, and technology transfer among research labs and between research systems and commercial products has accelerated. In addition, TREC has sponsored the
Ellen M. Voorhees