On August 12, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) posted a request for quotations (RFQ) for 2021 Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Incident Stream Extreme Task. Questions are due by 5:00 p.m. Eastern on August 16, and quotations are due by 5:00 p.m. Eastern on August 19.
The NIST Information Technology Laboratory’s (ITL) Information Access Division’s Retrieval Group works with industry, academia and other Government agencies to promote the use of more effective and efficient techniques for manipulating information not specifically structured for automatic use–especially the browsing, searching, and presentation of that information. Accurate evaluation of the capabilities of current information access systems is a prerequisite to improving the systems’ capabilities. Human-created annotations are essential to the evaluation of information systems. Over the years, these evaluations have helped dramatically improve the overall state-of-the-art in information retrieval systems.
The work of the Retrieval Group includes the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). One of the main goals of TREC is to promote research in information retrieval (IR) by providing appropriate test collections. IR test collections consist of three parts: a set of documents, a set of information needs called “topics” that can be answered by some of the documents in the document set, and a set of relevance assessments that lists for each topic the set of documents that are relevant to that topic.
Judging the quality of a system response requires Contractor personnel with a background which demonstrates applied use of sound analytical skills (e.g., former intelligence analysts), extensive experience in using search engines to gather information for decision making (not just a causal use of search engines), and good general computer skills. The end result of this project is to use the information gathered from the Contractor personnel to modify, test or improve existing search engines and also to develop new state of the art search engines. Also, this information is shared with universities around the US that are developing new ways to search for data on the web.
This project is part of the NIST mission of “promoting U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement in science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life”. With this project NIST seeks to advance the existing technology and to help create new technologies that help to improve our way of life.
Review the full RFQ information from NIST.
Source: SAM
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