The Importance of Focused Evaluations: A Case Study of TREC and DUC

Published

January 10, 2007

Author(s)

Donna K. Harman

Abstract

Evaluation has always been an important part of scientific research, and in information retrieval, this evaluation has mostly been done using test collections. In 1992 a new test collection was built at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and a focused evaluation (the Text REtrieval Conference or TREC) was started to use the collection. Results from nearly 10 years of this focused evaluation show significant technology transfer across systems, leading to major improvements in system performance. Focused evaluations also create the ability to target specific problems in language technology, such as retrieval across languages, and to design tasks for evaluation such that issues can be studied concurrently by multiple groups. This paper will discuss some of the tasks that have been examined in TREC, including critical factors in the design of those evaluations. Additionally, a new focused evaluation, the Document Understanding Conference (DUC) which will examine text summarization, will be introduced.

Citation

Proceedings Second NTCIR Workshop on Research in Chinese & Japanese Text Retrieval

Pub Type

Journals

Citation

Harman, D. (2007), The Importance of Focused Evaluations: A Case Study of TREC and DUC, Proceedings Second NTCIR Workshop on Research in Chinese & Japanese Text Retrieval (Accessed January 2, 2025)