TREC-COVID: Constructing a Pandemic Information Retrieval Test Collection
This work addresses the problem of building infrastructure for biomedical researchers and information retrieval systems during rapidly changing pandemics, though it is incremental as it adapts existing evaluation methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the challenge of creating a test collection for information retrieval during a pandemic, specifically focusing on COVID-19 literature, to capture evolving information needs and support new research in pandemic search.
TREC-COVID is a community evaluation designed to build a test collection that captures the information needs of biomedical researchers using the scientific literature during a pandemic. One of the key characteristics of pandemic search is the accelerated rate of change: the topics of interest evolve as the pandemic progresses and the scientific literature in the area explodes. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to capture this progression as it happens. TREC-COVID, in creating a test collection around COVID-19 literature, is building infrastructure to support new research and technologies in pandemic search.