Inactive

This is a Sources Sought Notice Only. Requests for a copy of a solicitation will not receive a response. This Notice is for planning purposes only and is not a Request for Proposal or a Request for Qu... This is a Sources Sought Notice Only. Requests for a copy of a solicitation will not receive a response. This Notice is for planning purposes only and is not a Request for Proposal or a Request for Quotation or an obligation on the part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for conducting a follow-on acquisition. NIST does not intend to award a contract on the basis of this Notice, or otherwise pay for the information requested. No entitlement of payment of direct or indirect costs or charges by NIST will arise as a result of submission of responses to this Notice and NIST’s use of such information. All proprietary data and information must be marked as such and may be included as a separate addendum to the non-marked/non-proprietary information. In the absence of such identification, NIST will assume to have unlimited rights to all technical data in the information paper. NIST is seeking to identify small business concern sources capable of providing Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), Text Retrieval Conference Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) and Text Analysis Conference (TAC) Support Services as described in this Notice for an anticipated Indefinite Delivery / Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) type contract. Instructions / Required Submissions Interested parties shall describe the capabilities of their organization as it relates to the requirements described above and in the Statement of Work details included below. The small business size standard associated with the NAICS code for this effort, 541990 – All Other Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services, is $16.5 Million. Interested parties shall include their business size classification and socio-economic status in response to this notice. The following information is required to be provided as part of the response to this Sources Sought Notice: 1. Documentation/Description of capabilities, which clearly demonstrates the capability of providing services relevant to those described in the within this Notice; 2.Documentation of any relevant experience in providing the required services; 3. Name, Address, DUNS number, CAGE code, business size, and point of contact information of the company; 4. Indication of whether the services described in this notice are currently on one or more GSA Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) contract(s) or Government-wide Acquisition Contracts (GWACs) and, if so, the applicable contract number(s). 5. Any other relevant information that is not listed above, which the Government should consider in finalizing its market research. All information considered pertinent to the covered requirement must be sent electronically to January Magyar at January.magyar@nist.gov. Information submitted must be specific and address the aforementioned requirement. Submissions must be received not later than 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on June 16, 2021. Original and e-mail submissions are acceptable. General Information After the results of this market research are obtained and analyzed, NIST may conduct a competitive procurement and subsequently award a contract. If at least two small businesses are identified during this market research, then a competitive procurement that results may be conducted as a small business set-aside. Statement of Work Details Background: 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 to improving the systems' capabilities. Human-created annotations are essential to the evaluation of information systems. Examples of these annotations include identification of documents that are relevant to a searcher's need, hand-written summaries of documents and sets of documents, and answers to questions. These annotations are fundamental to comparing the performance of automatic information systems, and to understanding differences within the range of performance that people achieve at the same tasks. The evaluation of search systems is performed within a series of workshops known as The Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). TREC requires the building of reference material for use in evaluation. This reference material includes a set of test questions plus judgments on whether text extracts answer the questions. The Text Retrieval Conference Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) extends this paradigm to the evaluation of systems that use multimedia queries to research large collections of digital videos. For the Text Analysis Conference (TAC), researchers are developing natural language understanding systems that will help a person automatically summarize, extract or identify key facts, pieces of knowledge, sentiment, beliefs, and other information present in a document or a set of documents. In an effort to fulfill ITL’s mission, NIST requires Contractor support to create judgments, view short video clips to determine if the clips contain the requested video material, to write summaries of Contractor selected documents, and to assess the summary content and the readability/linguistic quality of Contractor written summaries. The TREC, TRECVID, and TAC conferences are held yearly at NIST at the conclusion of the tasks. Scope of Work: The TREC, TRECVID, and TAC work to be performed includes, but is not limited to the following: Creating initial topic statements; Creating refined topic statements and relevance assessments; Creating queries (a short sentence that identifies a video uniquely); Creating descriptions of videos; Making judgments of whether a given segment of video contains a given feature (e.g. person; place, thing or event) or meets the information need specified in a topic (information request); Making annotations of the presence of entities or other linguistic structures in text; Creating usable topics with topic statements; Selecting newswire articles for each usable topic; Writing summaries for each usable topic and making assessments on the quality of the automatic and manual summaries; Reviewing topics, queries, descriptions, assessments, or annotations created within the task, for purposes of quality control Deliverables The deliverables for individual task orders will be specified in the respective task order.