Lab Report Special Section: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval Group Information Access and User Interfaces Division National Institute of Standards and Technology Donna Harman, Manager NIST Bldg. 225, Room A216 Gaithersburg, MD 20899 Overview The Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval Group was formed in 1994 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in recognition of the importance of managing the ever-increasing amount of electronically available text. The formal objective of the group is "to work with industry, academia and other government agencies to promote the use of more effective and efficient techniques for manipulating (largely) unstructured textual information, especially the browsing, searching, and presentation of that information". The group carries on the work in text retrieval started in 1988. Because of the initial work in text retrieval, the majority of the current projects involve improving the transfer of better text retrieval technology into commercial systems. Two approaches are being followed. The first approach (started in 1988) is to build a large-scale prototype retrieval system (the PRISE system) capable of handling over three gigabytes of data. This system uses natural language input and state-of-the-art statistical ranking mechanisms. The prototype has become the focus for continued
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