TREC 1999 Adhoc Dataset

The ad hoc retrieval task investigates the performance of systems that search a static set of documents using new questions (called topics in TREC). This task is similar to how a researcher might use a library - the collection is known but the questions likely to be asked are not known. NIST provides the participants approximately 2 gigabytes worth of documents and a set of 50 natural language topic statements. The participants produce a set of queries from the topic statements and run those queries against the documents. The output from this run is the official test result for the ad hoc task. Participants return the best 1000 documents retrieved for each topic to NIST for evaluation. The dataset comprises the documents, the topics, and the annotations of relevant documents.