SP500215 Overview of the Second Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-2) chapter D. Harman National Institute of Standards and Technology D. K. Harman 6.4 Summary The [OCRerr]fl[OCRerr]EC-2 conference demonstrated a wide range of different approaches to the retrieval of text from large document collections. There was significant improvement in retrieval performance over that seen in TREC-1, espe- cially in the routing task. The availability of large amounts of training data for routing allowed extensive experimentation in the best use of that data, and many dif- ferent approaches were tried in IREC-2. The automatic construction of queries from the topics continued to do as well as, or better than, manual construction of queries, and this is encouraging for groups supporting the use of simple natural language interfaces for retrieval systems. How well is the TREC initiative meeting its goals? There is certalaly increased research using a much larger collec- tion than had previously been tested. This leads not only to discoveriiig interesting research problems, but also to developing algorithms that are ripe for transfer into com- mercial systems. The conference itself provided the opportunity for this; there was open exchange between the research groups in universities and the research groups in commercial organizations and this is a very critical part of teclmology transfer. There will be a third TREC conference in 1994, and all the systems that participated in TREC-2 will be back, along with additional groups. 7. References Harman, D. (1993) (Ed.).The First Text REtrieval Confer- ence (TREC-1). National Institute of Standards and Tech- nology Special Publication 500-207, Harman, D. (1994). Data Preparation. In: Merchant R. (Ed.).The Proceedings of the TIPSTER Text Program - Phase L San Mateo, California: Morgan Kanfinaun Pub- lishing Co., 1994. Katzer. 3., McGill, M.J., Tessier, J.A., Frakes, W., and DasGupta, P. (1982). A Study of the Overlap among Doe- ument Representations. Information Technology: Research and Development, 1(2), 261-274. Salton, G. and McGill, M. (1983). Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Sparck Jones, K. and Van Rijsbergen, C. (1975). Report on the Need for and Provision of an `Ideal" Information Retrieval Test Collection, British Library Research and Development Report 5266, Computer Laboratory, Uni- versity of Cambridge. 1993. 20