Based on the important progresses made in information retrieval
(IR) in terms of theoretical models and evaluations, more and
more attention has recently been paid to the research in domain
specific IR, as evidenced by the organization of Genomics and
Legal tracks in TREC (Text REtrieval Conference). We think that
now is the right time to carry out large scale evaluations on
chemistry datasets in order to promote the research in chemical IR
in general and chemical patent IR in particular. Accordingly, we
propose the organization of a chemical IR track in TREC in order
to address the challenges in chemical and patent IR. In this
position paper, we present the research questions we will address
in the proposed track, our initial plan of the proposed track, and
the kind of search tasks we propose for the track. We focus on the
design of a new chemical entity search task consisting of two subtasks,
i.e., chemical entity search and chemical entity relation
search.