The Text Retrieval Conferences (TRECs)

There have been four Text REtrieval Conferences TRECs TREC-1 in November 1992, TREC-2 in August 1993, TREC-3 in November 1994 and TREC-4 in November 1995. The number of participating systems has grown from 25 in TREC-1 to 36 in TREC-4, including most of the major text retrieval software companies and most of the universities doing research in text retrieval see table for some of the participants. The diversity of the participating groups has ensured that TREC represents many different approaches to text retrieval, while the emphasis on individual experiments evaluated in a common setting has proven to be a major strength of TREC.