Overview of the TREC 2004 Novelty Track

TREC 2004 marks the third and nal year for the novelty track. The task is as follows: Given a TREC topic and an ordered list of documents, systems must nd the relevant and novel sentences that should be returned to the user from this set. This task integrates aspects of passage retrieval and information ltering. As in 2003, there were two categories of topics { events and opinions { and four subtasks which provided systems with varying amounts of relevance or novelty information as training data. This year, the task was made harder by the inclusion of some number of irrelevant documents in document sets. Fourteen groups participated in the track this year.