Participants Wanted for 2007 Text Retrieval Trials

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is seeking participants for its upcoming Text Retrieval Conference—TREC 2007. Since 1992, TREC has been fostering research to enable more powerful, faster and easier-to-use technologies for information retrieval. TREC 2007 will focus on seven tracks—including a blog track, to explore information seeking behavior in the blogosphere, and a legal track to develop search technology to help the legal profession find information pertinent to a case in digital document collections. For each TREC, NIST provides a test set of documents and questions. Participants run their own retrieval systems on the data and return to NIST a list of the retrieved top-ranked documents. NIST pools the individual results, judges the retrieved documents for correctness, and evaluates the results. The TREC cycle ends with a workshop in November that is a forum for participants to share their experiences. Organizations wishing to participate must submit an application by Feb. 20, 2007. For more information, see http://trec.nist.gov/call07.html.