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

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.