SP500207 Site Report for the Text REtrieval Conference chapter P. Nelson National Institute of Standards and Technology Donna K. Harman Conclusions I Future The performance of ConQuest exceeded all our expectations. The system is still young, and we fully expected that much more time would be required to rework the ranking algorithms and evaluate the system. These positive results from ThEC indicate that we are well on our way to superior retrieval performance. Since TREC, ConQuest has been working on detailed analysis of all factors which drive ranking and retrieval. This includes the dictionary, morphology, idiom processing, term expansion, and the ranking engine itself. We feel that our performance on ThEC is good start, but that it does not represent our full potential. We look forward to IREC-2 to see how much further we can progress. 296