TREC-CHEM: large scale chemical information retrieval evaluation at TREC

Over the past decades, significant progress has been made in Information Retrieval (IR), ranging from efficiency and scalability to theoretical modeling and evaluation. However, many grand challenges remain. Recently, more and more attention has been paid to the research in domain specific IR applications, as evidenced by the organization of Genomics and Legal tracks in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). Now it is the right time to carry out large scale evaluations on chemical datasets in order to promote the research in chemical IR in general and chemical Patent IR in particular. Accordingly, we organize a chemical IR track in TREC (TREC-CHEM) in order to address the challenges in chemical and patent IR. This paper describes these challenges and the accomplishments of the first year and opens up the discussions for the next year.