The SMART Information Retrieval Project

Chris Buckley, Gerard Salton, James Allan

Abstract: The primary goal of the SMART information retrieval project at Cornell University remains, as it has for the past 30 years, investigating the effectiveness and efficiency of automatic methods of retrieval of text. In recent years this has expanded to include retrieval of parts of documents in response to both user queries (passage retrieval) and parts of other documents (automatic hypertext links). The emphasis of SMART has always been on purely automatic text retrieval --- starting from an arbitrary piece of natural language text from the user and matching against automatically indexed documents --- and this continues.