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<Paper uid="H94-1070">
  <Title>OVERVIEW OF THE SECOND TEXT RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE (TREC-2)</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="354" end_page="354" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
3. SUMMARY
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The TREC-2 conference demonstrated a wide range of different approaches to the retrieval of text from large document collections. There was significant improvement in retrieval performance over that seen in TREC-1, especially in the muting task. The availability of large amounts of training data for routing allowed extensive experimentation in the best use of that data, and many different approaches were tried in TREC-2. The automatic construction of queries from the topics continued to do as well as, or better than, manual construction of queries, and this is encouraging for groups supporting the use of simple natural language interfaces for retrieval systems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The conference itself continued to provide an open forum for exchange of results, and the increased participation by commercial groups will speed the transfer of TREC algorithms into readily-available software products.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> There is a TREC-3 planned for November 1994, with most of the TREC-2 participants returning, and a current roster of over 55 groups participating.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>