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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20671 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20671/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Reproduction Beyond Benchmarks: ConstBERT and ColBERT-v2 Across Backends and Query Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09982/) (2026)
- [LLM Olympiad: Why Model Evaluation Needs a Sealed Exam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23292/) (2026)
- [Multilingual and Domain-Agnostic Tip-of-the-Tongue Query Generation for Simulated Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21096/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.