Lab report special section
W. Bruce Croft · ACM SIGIR Forum · 1995
The most significant accomplishments we have made to date are the numerous research advances we have made and the success we have had in rapidly moving this research into software that is distributed to our members.The research advances, which have been reported in 80 papers since the start of the Center, cover a wide range of areas, including text representation, retrieval strategies, distributed retrieval, query processing, routing, integration with database systems, information extraction, automated knowledge acquisition, and case-based reasoning.A bibliography of these papers can be found in the Center's web home page (http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/).Some of the most significant results have been new techniques for database location and result merging in a distributed or networked environment, techniques for using passage-level representations in retrieval and feedback, a technique for automatically expanding queries through corpus analysis, a new approach to morphological analysis for IR, some of the first studies of how text extraction can be combined with IR, query and indexing optimizations using a persistent object management system, and a new approach to supporting database browsing using concepts.Apart from the research publications, the impact of this research has been validated by the consistently good performance that the INQUERY retrieval engine has shown in the government-sponsored TREC evaluations.The CIIR is carrying out a range of technology transfer projects with industrial and government members.The INQUERY retrieval engine is the primary example.INQUERY is distributed to more than 52 universities, research laboratories, government agencies, and companies.We are also supporting two commercial licenses currently, and a major legal information system (WIN/WESTLAW) is based on research done in the Center.The Lotus Customer Service Centers use a client-server version of INQUERY which has been customized with their own interface and domain-specific indexing.InfoSeek, a company that is gaining increasing attention as a commercial provider of Internet services, has licensed INQUERY.On the government side, the THOMAS system, which provides access to Congressional bills and the Congressional Record over the Internet, was developed by the Library of Congress using INQUERY.The LoC has also collaborated with us to provide access to photographs, speeches and film clips over the Internet through the American Memory project.The Department of Commerce provides access to the National Trade Databank over the Internet using INQUERY and recently made the Federal Budget available on-line (the STAT/USA system) to the White House and others.