TAC is organized by the Retrieval Group of the Information Access Division (IAD) in the Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Initiated in 2008, TAC grew out of NIST's Document Understanding Conference (DUC) for text summarization, and the Question Answering Track of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). TAC is sponsored by NIST and other U.S. government agencies and is overseen by an Advisory Committee consisting of representatives from government, industry, and academia...
TAC's mission is to support research within the Natural Language Processing community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of NLP methodologies. TAC's primary purpose is not competitive benchmarking; the emphasis is on advancing the state of the art through evaluation results.