AMENDMENT 001

The purposes of this amendment are as follows:

1.) To respond to questions posed by potential offerors regarding the solicitation. The official responses to these questions are detailed in the attached titled "Amendment 001 Questions & Answers - SB1341-16-RQ-0184."

2.) To amend Attachment II - Statement of Work

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THIS IS A COMBINED SYNOPSIS/SOLICITATION FOR COMMERCIAL ITEMS PREPARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FORMAT IN FAR SUBPART 12.6-STREAMLINED PROCEDURES FOR EVALUATION AND SOLICITATION FOR COMMERCIAL ITEMS-AS SUPPLEMENTED WITH ADDITIONAL INFORMATION INCLUDED IN THIS NOTICE. THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION; QUOTATIONS ARE BEING REQUESTED, AND A WRITTEN SOLICITATION DOCUMENT WILL NOT BE ISSUED.

This solicitation is a Request for Quotation (RFQ). The solicitation document and incorporated provisions and clauses are those in effect through Federal Acquisition Circular 05-86-2.

The associated North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) code for this procurement is 541990 - All Other Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services. The small business size standard is $15.0M. This acquisition is 100% set-aside for small businesses. Simplified acquisition procedures will be utilized.

Background Information

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory's (ITL) Information Access Division's Retrieval Group works with industry, academia and other government agencies to promote the use of more effective and efficient techniques for manipulating information not specifically structured for automatic use--especially the browsing, searching, and presentation of that information. Accurate evaluation of the capabilities of current information access systems is a prerequisite for improving the systems' capabilities. Human-created annotations are essential to the evaluation of information systems. Over the years, these evaluations have helped dramatically improve the overall state-of-the-art in information retrieval systems.

The work of the Retrieval Group includes the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). One of the main goals of TREC is to promote research in information retrieval (IR) by providing appropriate test collections. IR test collections consist of three parts: a set of documents, a set of information needs called "topics" that can be answered by some of the documents in the document set, and a set of relevance assessments that lists for each topic the set of documents that are relevant to that topic.

TREC consist of several tracks. The Dynamic Domain (DD) track was developed in 2015 to support research in dynamic, exploratory searches within complex information domains. More specifically, the goal of the Dynamic Domain (DD) track is to examine dynamic, feedback-driven search algorithms that use machine learning to help a user explore a narrow subject domain.

NIST requires Contractor support services to modify and improve existing search engines as well as develop new state of the art search engines.

Reference attachments for complete combined synopsis/solicitation.

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