SP500215 Preface preface National Institute of Standards and Technology D. K. Harman Preface This report constitutes the prooeedings of the seeond Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-2) held in Gaithers- burg, Maryland, August 31-September 2, 1993. The conference was co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Advaeced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and was attended by 150 people involved in the 31 participatlng groups. The conference was the second in an on-going series of workshops to evaluate new technologies in text retrieval. The workshop included plenary sessions and twelve dsscussion groups. Because the participants in the workshop drew on their personal experiences, they sometimes cited specific vendors and commercial products. The inclusion or omission of a particular company or product does not imply either endorsement or criticism by NIST. The sponsorship of the Software and Intelligent Systems Technology Office of the Advanced Research Pr[OCRerr] jects Agency is gratefally acknowledged, along with the tremendous work of the program committee. Donna Harman February 20, 1994 TREC-2 Program Committee Donna Harman, NIST, chair Chris Buckley, Cornell University Susan Dumais, Bellcore Darryl Howard, U.S. Department of Defense David Lewis, AT & T Bell Labs John Prange, U.S. Department of Defense Alan Smeaton, Dublin City University, keland Richard Tong, Advanced Decision Systems Steve Walker, City University, UK "I