OVERVIEW OF THE 2ND TEXT RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE (TREC-2)

The second Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-2) was held in August, 1993, and was attended by about 150 people involved in 31 participating groups. The goal of the conference was to bring research groups together to discuss their work on a new large test collection. There was a large variation of retrieval techniques reported on, including methods using automatic thesaurii, sophisticated term weighting, natural language techniques, relevance feedback, and advanced pattern matching. As results had been run through a common evaluation package, groups were able to compare the effectiveness of different techniques, and discuss how differences between the systems affected performance.