Overview of the TREC 2025 Tip-of-the-Tongue Track
Jaime Arguello, Fernando Diaz, Maik Fröebe, To Eun Kim, and Bhaskar MitraIn proc. Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), 2026
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Research Theme: Tip-of-the-Tongue Known-Item Retrieval
Tip-of-the-tongue (ToT) known-item retrieval is defined as an item identification task in which the searcher has previously experienced an item but cannot recall a reliable identifier (i.e., “It’s on the tip of my tongue…”). ToT queries are verbose and contain a wide-range of complex phenomena. Importantly, such phenomena are influenced by: (1) what we remember (i.e., long-term memory) and (2) how we naturally convey our memories to others. Complex phenomena include contextual memories, comparisons, mentions of uncertainty, false memories, and mentions of exclusion criteria, to name a few. Current IR systems are not well-equipped to address ToT information needs.
Shared task organization
- Tip-of-the-Tongue task, NII Test Collection for IR Systems (NTCIR), (2026)
- Tip-of-the-Tongue track, Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), (2023-2025)
Publications
In proc. Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), 2026
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Tip of the Tongue Query Elicitation for Simulated Evaluation
Yifan He, To Eun Kim, Fernando Diaz, Jaime Arguello, and Bhaskar MitraIn proc. ACM SIGIR, 2025
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Overview of the TREC 2024 Tip-of-the-Tongue Track
Jaime Arguello, Samarth Bhargav, Fernando Diaz, To Eun Kim, Yifan He, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Bhaskar MitraIn proc. Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), 2025
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Overview of the TREC 2023 Tip-of-the-Tongue Track
Jaime Arguello, Samarth Bhargav, Fernando Diaz, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Bhaskar MitraIn proc. Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), 2024
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Tip of the Tongue Known-Item Retrieval: A Case Study in Movie Identification
Jaime Arguello, Adam Ferguson, Emery Fine, Bhaskar Mitra, Hamed Zamani, and Fernando DiazIn proc. ACM CHIIR, 2021
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