A very fast prototype retrieval system using statistical ranking

Abstract

The most striking result in working with Professor Gerald Salton over 20 years ago on the comparison between the SMART system and the MEDLARS system [Salton69] was the fact that whereas Boolean retrieval (MEDLARS) did very well or very poorly, the SMART system always seemed to find some of the relevant records. All of us working at Cornell University during that time wanted to run a full-scale comparison between these systems to demonstrate what was to us the clear superiority of a ranking retrieval system, but this was not possible due to lack of funding and other problems.