ITL hosts the 10th Text Retrieval Conference TREC 2001

The Information Access Division of ITL held the tenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) conference at NIST in Gaithersburg November 13-16, 2001. TREC is a series of NIST evaluation workshops designed to foster research on technologies for information retrieval. With 87 groups from 22 different countries participating by submitting retrieval results, TREC 2001 was the largest TREC by far. Participants included academic, commercial and government organizations.

TREC 2001 debuted the video track, the first large-scale comparison of different video retrieval systems using a common data set and task. Three different tasks were tested in the track: shot boundary detection, known-item search, and general search. For the general search task, the data set consisted of approximately eleven hours of MPEG-1 video recordings and 74 search requests. Each search request contained a text description of the information wanted (for example, "scenes that depict the lift off of the Space Shuttle"), and possibly some examples of that type of information. Video retrieval systems of twelve participating groups produced a ranked list of video shots in response to each request, and the lists were judged for correctness by human assessors. Other tracks in TREC 2001 tested web searching, cross-language document retrieval, question answering, document filtering, and interactive search.

At the conclusion of the conference the TREC program committee presented Donna Harman and Ellen Voorhees of ITL's Information Access Division with certificates of appreciation for NIST's leadership role in organizing the TREC conference series.

CONTACT: Ellen Voorhees, ext. 3761