The SMART (System for the Mechanical Analysis and Retrieval of Text) Information Retrieval System is an information retrieval system developed at Cornell University in the 1960s. Many important concepts in information retrieval were developed as part of research on the SMART system, including the vector space model, relevance feedback, and Rocchio Classification.
Gerard Salton led the group that developed SMART. Other contributors included Mike Lesk.
The SMART system also provides a set a corpora, queries and reference rankings, taken from different subjects, notably
- ADI: publications from information science reviews
- CACM: computer science
- Cranfield collection: publications from aeronautic reviews
- CISI: library science
- Medlars collection: publications from medical reviews
- Time magazine collection: archives of the generalist review Time in 1963
To the legacy of the SMART system belongs the so-called SMART 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 document vector and the second three letters represents the term weighting for the query vector. The letter representation for a term, and document, is as follows :
| Term frequency | Document frequency | Normalization |
|---|---|---|
| n (natural): | n (no): 1 | n (none): 1 |
| l (logarithm): 1+log | t (idf): log | c (cosine): |
| a (augmented): 0.5 + | p (prob idf): | b (byte size): |
b (boolean):  |
||
| L (log average): |
where tf is the term frequency of term in document .
Famous quotes containing the words smart, information and/or system:
“The majority of persons choose their wives with as little prudence as they eat. They see a trull with nothing else to recommend her but a pair of thighs and choice hunkers, and so smart to void their seed that they marry her at once. They imagine they can live in marvelous contentment with handsome feet and ambrosial buttocks. Most men are accredited fools shortly after they leave the womb.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)
“Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)