Overview of the Eighth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-8).

Abstract

The Eighth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-8)... This paper serves as an introduction to the research described in detail in the remainder of the volume. It concentrates on the main task, ad hocretrieval, which is defined in the next section. Details regarding the test collections and evaluation methodology used in TREC follow in sections 3 and 4, while section 5 provides an overview of the ad hoc retrieval results. In addition to the main ad hoc task, TREC-8 contained seven "tracks," tasks that focus research on particular subproblems of text retrieval. Taken together, the tracks represent the bulk of the experiments performed in TREC-8. However, each track has its own overview paper included in the proceedings, so this paper presents only a short summary of each track in section 6. The final section looks forward to future TREC conferences.