NIST HOSTS NINTH TEXT RETRIEVAL WORKSHOP (TREC-9).

NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology, Washington, DC, www.nist.gov) The standards-defining agency of the U.S. government, formerly the National Bureau of Standards. It is one of three agencies that fall under the Technology Administration (www.technology. hosted the ninth workshop in the Text Retrieval Conference For other uses of "TREC", see TREC.

The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) is an on-going series of workshops focusing on a list of different information retrieval (IR) research areas, or tracks. (TREC TREC Texas Real Estate Commission
TREC Text Retrieval Conference
TREC Technique de Randonnée Equestre de Compétition
TREC Tropical Research and Education Center
TREC T-cell Receptor Excision Circle
TREC Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating ) series at NIST in Gaithersburg in November 2000. Seventy groups representing 17 countries participated in the workshop to discuss the results of a yearlong cycle of testing that was conducted by NIST.

In addition to the breakthrough in question-answer technology, a second emphasis in this years TREC was an examination of the infrastructure required to evaluate Web search engines A Web site that maintains an index and short summaries of billions of pages on the Web, Google being the world's largest. Most search engine sites are free and paid for by advertising banners, while others charge for the service. . The Web differs from other data collections used in TREC in a variety of ways: size; variety of subject matter, media types, languages, and presentation styles; lack of specific editorial control; explicit links among documents; frequent changes to documents; and generated content. Any of these differences may impact retrieval effectiveness, and the challenge facing the retrieval community is building appropriate test suites that can isolate the effects of these different factors. The Web site is http://trec.nist.gov.

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Publication:	Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
Article Type:	Brief Article
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Mar 1, 2001
Words:	149
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