An Initial Test Collection for Ranked Retrieval of SMS Conversations

This paper describes a test collection for evaluating systems that search English SMS (Short Message Service) conversations. The collection is built from about 120,000 text messages. Topic development involved identifying typical types of information needs, then generating topics of each type for which relevant content might be found in the collection. Relevance judgments were then made for groups of messages that were most highly ranked by one or more of several ranked retrieval systems. The resulting TREC style test collection can be used to compare some alternative retrieval system designs.