NIST and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) co-sponsored the eighth conference in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) workshop series in November 1999, at NIST. Sixty-six groups participated in TREC-8, including representatives from 16 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Twenty-two of the participating groups were companies.Two new tracks were introduced into TREC this year, a question-answering track and a web track. In the question-answering track, participants received a 2 GB document set and a list of 200 questions. The questions were fact-based, short-answer questions such as "How many calories are there in a Big Mac?" and each question was guaranteed to have at least one document in the collection that contained the complete answer. Participants returned answer strings with a maximum length of 50 bytes in response to each question, which then were judged for correctness by human judges. The track was the first large-scale evaluation of systems designed for domain-independent question answering.
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