Amaryllis was organised by the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique (INIST) with the support of the Agence francophone pour l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche (AUPELF-UREF) and the French Ministère de l’Education Nationale, de la Recherche et de la Technologie (MERT).

More specifically, the objective was to create document corpora, questions and answers, in the framework of the ARC A1 (Action de Recherche Concertée), renamed as Amaryllis-Access to text information in French, in order to get similar works to the United-States project TREC.

All corpora are structured as SGML files with isolating character-encoding.

The available corpora were provided by:

  INIST (Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique).
  OFIL (Observatoire Français et International des Industries de la Langue).
  ELRA (European Language Resources Association).

Each provider provided three types of corpora : text documents, search topics and answers to these topics in the corresponding text corpora (with frames of reference for the answers).

Amaryllis and CLEF (Cross-Language Evaluation Forum), the first at a French level, the latter at a European level, have recently merged together. Indeed, both projects are involved in the field of evaluation of human language technologies, and will offer a common set of evaluation-tests in 2002.