During the Summer of 2002, NIST will conduct a Dry Run TDT Evaluation which will conclude with a one-day meeting to discuss issues. All first time TDT participants and past TDT participants developing new systems must run the dry run evaluation. Since this year's data contains Arabic, all past participants are in essence developing new systems.

Dry run evaluations have proven invaluable in past evaluations to help debug systems and to ensure all developers are generating TDT-compliant system output.

Participants should only submit system runs for the primary evaluation conditions as per the evaluation plan. The intent of the dry run is not to grade system performance, but rather to familiarize new participants with the evaluation infrastructure and system requirements.

Dry Run Meeting

The Dry Run meeting will be held in on July 23, 2002. The meeting will be a one day meeting to discuss the dry run and plan for future TDT work. Details for the Dry Run concerning registration and hotel information will be forthcoming. The meeting is optional, however perspective participants in the TDT 2002 evaluation are strongly encouraged to attend.

Dry Run Evaluation Resources

The dry run will use the latest version of the TDT3 corpora (TDT3 Multilanguage Text Version 2.0 LDC # LDC2001T58) and a supplemental corpus of Arabic data (LDC #LDC2002E32 Version 1.1).

NIST has prepared dry run evaluation index files for the dry run. Use these files to generate your submissions sent to NIST. There is an established protocol for submitting system outputs to NIST. Please follow these instructions so that NIST can digest them expeditiously.

Per the schedule, dry run results are due at NIST on July 10th. This deadline is rapidly approaching given the late delivery time of the Arabic supplemental corpus. However, sites are strongly encouraged to make the deadline, or certainly process the data before the meeting scheduled July 23rd. A topic at the meeting will be the Arabic data and unresolved issues. It is important that people work with the data prior to the meeting.