The SMART (System for the Mechanical Analysis and Retrieval of Text) Information Retrieval System is an
information retrieval system developed at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to ...
in the 1960s. Many important concepts in information retrieval were developed as part of research on the SMART system, including the
vector space model
Vector space model or term vector model is an algebraic model for representing text documents (and any objects, in general) as vectors of identifiers (such as index terms). It is used in information filtering, information retrieval, indexing and ...
,
relevance feedback Relevance feedback is a feature of some information retrieval systems. The idea behind relevance feedback is to take the results that are initially returned from a given query, to gather user feedback, and to use information about whether or not t ...
, and
Rocchio classification.
Gerard Salton
Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton (8 March 1927 in Nuremberg – 28 August 1995) was a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, a ...
led the group that developed SMART. Other contributors included
Mike Lesk
Michael E. Lesk (born 1945) is an American computer scientist.
Biography
In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as ...
.
The SMART system also provides a set of corpora, queries and reference rankings, taken from different subjects, notably
*
ADI: publications from information science reviews
*
Computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...
*
Cranfield
Cranfield is a village and civil parish in the west of Bedfordshire, England, situated between Bedford and Milton Keynes. It had a population of 4,909 in 2001. increasing to 5,369 at the 2011 Census. The parish is in Central Bedfordshire un ...
collection: publications from aeronautic reviews
*
Forensic science: library science
*
MEDLARS
MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medic ...
collection: publications from medical reviews
*
Time magazine
''Time'' (stylized in all caps) is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York City on M ...
collection: archives of the generalist review ''Time'' in 1963
To the legacy of the SMART system belongs the so-called SMART triple notation, a mnemonic scheme for denoting
tf-idf weighting variants in the vector space model. The mnemonic for representing a combination of weights takes the form
ddd.qqq
, where the first three letters represents the term weighting of the collection document vector and the second three letters represents the term weighting for the query document vector. For example,
ltc.lnn
represents the
ltc
weighting applied to a collection document and the
lnn
weighting applied to a query document.
The following tables establish the SMART notation:
The gray letters in the first, fifth, and ninth columns are the scheme used by Salton and Buckley in their 1988 paper.
[Salton, G., & Buckley, C. (1988)]
Term-Weighting Approaches in Automatic Text Retrieval
''Inf. Process. Manage., 24'', 513-523. The bold letters in the second, sixth, and tenth columns are the scheme used in experiments reported thereafter.
References
External links
*
tp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/smart/ Software and test collections(FTP at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to ...
)
Interactive SMART tutorial
Discontinued software
Search engine software
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