TREC Track

(...paddiwack, give a dog a bone!)

We're tackling TREC! A handful of us Compling students have decided that we're going to get together over the next few months to build something to submit to TREC, the "Text REtrieval Conference." Basically, it's a sort of evaluation conference, where they organize IR tasks and problems and compile resources, and participants build programs to use the resources to attack the problems. Ultimately you run your program on the TREC evaluation data, and present your results. Winners get, well, fame and glory, and some nice things to say on their CVs.

The track we've decided to apply to is Question Answering, which is REALLY ambitious. I'm not certain we stand a snowball's chance (well, maybe in the outer circles), since most of the people working in this area have been doing so for years, and have a lot of resources and experience at their disposal. But in its favor, this type of problem covers all of the topics we've discussed in our coursework so far, and easily breaks down into sub-tasks that we can tackle one piece at a time.

Most of all, though, this is the exact task that got me interested in this field in the first place. And here we're going to BUILD a real system!

I'm so excited I can hardly stand it. Even if we don't get anything finished in time, or even if we finish and it sucks, the experience is still going to be invaluable, not to mention fun in the meanwhile. Wish me luck!!! :)