Overview of the first TREC conference

The first Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-1) was held in early November 1992 and was attended by about 100 people working in the 25 participating groups. The goal of the conference was to bring research groups together to discuss their work on a new large test collection. There was a large variety of retrieval techniques reported on, including methods using automatic thesaurii, sophisticated term weighting, natural language techniques, relevance feedback, and advanced pattern matching. As results had been run through a common evaluation package, groups were able to compare the effectiveness of different techniques, and discuss how differences among the sytems affected performance.