Overview - Interactive 1995

Proceedings | Data | Results | Runs | Participants

The interactive track focusses the adhoc task on the process of doing searches interactively. It was felt by many groups that TREC uses evaluation for a batch retrieval environment rather than the more common interactive environments seen today. However there are few tools for evaluating interactive systems, and none that seem appropriate to TREC. The interactive track has a double goal of developing better methodologies for interactive evaluation and investigating in depth how users search the TREC topics. Eleven groups took part in this track in TREC-4. A subset of the adhoc topics was used, and many different types of experiments were run. The common thread was that all groups used the same topics, performed the same task(s), and recorded the same information about how the searches were done. Task 1 was to retrieve as many relevant documents as possible within a certain timeframe. Task 2 was to construct the best query possible.

Track coordinator(s):

• Donna Harman, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

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