Overview of the TREC 2003 Novelty Track

Abstract

The novelty track was first introduced in TREC 2002.Given a TREC topic and an ordered list of documents, systems must find the relevant and novelsentences that should be returned to the user from this set. This task integrates aspects of passage re-trieval and information filtering. This year, rather than using old TREC topics and documents, we de-veloped fifty new topics specifically for the novelty track. These topics were of two classes: "events"and "opinions". Additionally, the documents were ordered chronologically, rather than according to aretrieval status value. There were four tasks which provided systems with varying amounts of relevanceor novelty information as training data. Fourteen groups participated in the track this year.