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LBSC 796/INFM 718R
Information Retrieval Systems
Fall 2007
Information Retrieval Resources

Available Text Retrieval Systems

The following systems are available for use in this course. Those with links can be downloaded freely and used anywhere. For access to other systems, please check with the teaching assistant. The three you are most likely to want to use are listed first, others are listed in alphabetical order for completeness.
URA
An integrated Java package that includes components from Lucene, Terrier, and the Stanford NLP tools.
Lucene
A freely available Java IR system, probably the easiest system to get up and running, and the most easily modified.
Indri
Indri is optimized for efficiency, and thus is probably the best choice if you have a very large collection. It is built on top of the Lemur toolkit for building language modeling systems for information retrieval.
Zettair
Zettair is optimized for both efficiency and modifiability. It therefore occupies a part of the design space between Lucene and Indri.
Cheshire 3
Freely available research software implementing a logistic regression model from the University of California at Berkeley. Gettig it working may require some facility with Z39.50.
Glimpse
Freely available software from the University of Arizona that is designed for efficient indexing (at some cost in retrieval efficiency). Glimpse is not configured for TREC-style evaluations, so that would take some extra work.
InQuery
Commercial software based on inference networks that has a very flexible query language. We have a research and teaching license for this system from the University of Massachusetts, and still use it occassionally. InQuery includes a fairly nice X-Windows interface and it is configured to run TREC-style evaluations, but the source code is not available.
IRF
A Java toolkit for building IR systems for small applications. The strength of IRF is that the object oriented framework greatly simplifies tasks that require working wiht the source code. Bt because Java is designed for platform independence rather than efficiency, the size of the collections that can be handled is quite limited.
MG
Research software from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology that is designed to maximize storage efficiency on very large collectons. It is available under the GNU public license. We installed this once several years ago and it wasn't too difficult. Click here to download the tarfile.
PRISE
Public domain vector space research software developed at NIST We regularly use this system for TDT evaluations. PRISE includes a very nice Z39.50 interface, but it takes some facility with that stangard to get the interactive part running. PRISE is configured to run TREC-style evaluations and the source code is available.
SMART
A vector space research software that is freely available by FTP from Cornell University. We have extensive experience using SMART. SMART includes only a VT-100 interface, but it is configured to run TREC-style evaluations and the source code is available.
Terrier
An information retrieval system from the University of Glasgow that is optimized for efficiency. Terrier implements the divergence from randomness framework for ranked retrieval.
Xapian
An open source IR system that is designed ot run under Linux. Xiapan is a descendent of Omseek, which itself is a decendent of Open Muscat. Xiapan is designed to handle several Western European languages, and thus might be a good choice if you want to work with languages other than English.

IR Books

Online Sources for IR Papers

A Very Incomplete List of IR Research Groups

IR Resource Pages

Other Useful Resources

Doug Oard
Last modified: Aug 18 2007