SIGIR workshop on interactive retrieval at TREC and beyond

The annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) has become a major event in information retrieval (IR) research. Over the last few years, its main focus has changed from the common ad hoc and routing tasks to tracks focused on special interests, such as cross-language retrieval, question answering, and large database/Web retrieval. In each of the tracks, a common task and test collection is developed each year for all participating groups to undertake. One problem the tracks have is a paucity of face-to-face meetings, since the only certain time each track actually meets is at the annual TREC meeting. For many tracks, this time is too early to work out all the details of the coming year’s track, and most additional work is done via email.