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Overview of the Sixth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-6)

Published

Author(s)

Ellen M. Voorhees, Donna K. Harman

Abstract

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 effectiveness has approximately doubled, and technology transfer among research labs and between research systems and commercial products has accelerated. In addition, TREC has sponsored the first large-scale evaluations of Chinese language retrieval, retrieval of speech, andretrieval across different languages.
Citation
Information Processing and Management

Keywords

Information retrieval, text retrieval

Citation

Voorhees, E. and Harman, D. (1999), Overview of the Sixth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-6), Information Processing and Management, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=151399 (Accessed October 14, 2025)

Issues

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Created October 25, 1999, Updated February 17, 2017
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