1. March 8, 2000 IS 240: Principles of Information Retrieval
The SMART System:
Progress Report on System Acquisition and Set-Up
Danyel Fisher
Jonathan Henke
Jason Hong
Jonathan Huang
Jeane Stetson
March 8, 2000
IS 240: Principles of Information Retrieval

2. Background Developed 1961-64 at Harvard
Maintained at Cornell University
Tested at every TREC conference
Emphasis: automatic retrieval (rather than interactive)
Vector-based analysis, tf x idf weighting
Current version: 13.3 (we have 11.0)

3. Bibliography
Salton, Gerard. The SMART retrieval system; experiments in automatic document processing. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall. 1971
Salton, Gerard. “Developments in Automatic Text Retrieval.” Science, 1991 Aug 30, v253 n5023:
TREC Proceedings
SMART Staff, “User's Manual for the SMART Information Retrieval System’”. Technical Report 71-95, Revised April Cornell University (1974).
C. Buckley, Implemetation of the SMART Information Retrieval System. Technical Report , Cornell University (1985).

4. Indexing (Creating a Collection)
Document pre-parsing
recognize document structure and convert to a standard format
Finding & handling indexable information
parsing, stopword removal, stemming, term clustering, synonym dictionaries, etc.
Query handling
parsing, stopword removal, stemming, etc. (parallel to document handling)

5. Indexing (Creating a Collection)
Retrieval methods
term weighting and similarity evaluation
Default: standard tf x idf weighting, vector inner product
Output format & display

6. Indexing: Customizable Elements
Document location & format
Indexable information & index format
Query format
Retrieval method (document/query comparison)
Output/display format

7. System Architecture 350 source files 45,000 lines of code
Can include user-programmed modules

8. Set-up Procedure Download source code Compile Look for documentation
ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/smart
Compile
Look for documentation
Indexing completed using default settings
Unable to complete query yet
Unable to examine index
Cannot verify success of indexing!

9. System Documentation Minimal Poorly explained Cryptic
Uses their own specific terminology

10. Problems Faced Virtually every feature is customizable
Somewhere there are people who know how to do the customization…..
“SMART suffers from the advantages and disadvantages of most academic research software. It's designed to be extremely flexible (as long as you know what you're doing!)” - SMART manual
Documentation is too high level.

11. Further Steps Complete a query using default settings.
Identify specific files for adjusting each customizable feature.
Determine how to modify each feature.

12. Recommendations & Advice
Find someone who has actually worked with the system before.
Understanding operation requires examination of C source code.
Customization requires modifying / creating C code.