Overview of the TREC 2025 Tip-of-the-Tongue track

TL;DR

The TREC 2025 Tip-of-the-Tongue track evaluated retrieval methods for complex, verbose ToT queries across diverse sources, highlighting challenges and advancements in handling such difficult information requests.

Contribution

This paper presents the extended ToT track for 2025, incorporating diverse query sources and a broader domain to advance retrieval techniques for complex ToT queries.

Findings

9 groups submitted 32 runs

Extended test queries from multiple sources

Enhanced understanding of ToT retrieval challenges

Abstract

Tip-of-the-tongue (ToT) known-item retrieval involves re-finding an item for which the searcher does not reliably recall an identifier. ToT information requests (or queries) are verbose and tend to include several complex phenomena, making them especially difficult for existing information retrieval systems. The TREC 2025 ToT track focused on a single ad-hoc retrieval task. This year, we extended the track to general domain and incorporated different sets of test queries from diverse sources, namely from the MS-ToT dataset, manual topic development, and LLM-based synthetic query generation. This year, 9 groups (including the track coordinators) submitted 32 runs.