RetrievalWare

History

RetrievalWare was initially created by Paul Nelson, Kenneth Clark, and Edwin Addison as part of ConQuest Software. Development began in 1989, but the software was not commercially available on a wide scale until 1992. Early funding was provided by Rome Laboratory via a Small Business Innovation Research grant.. John McGrath joined the company in 1993 as VP of Sales and Marketing. The company quickly grew revenue from U.S. federal contracts, publishers, and enterprise customers requiring advanced text retrieval accuracy and performance. | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110604195658/http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA252509&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf | url-status = dead | archive-date = June 4, 2011

On July 6, 1995, ConQuest Software was merged with the NASDAQ company, Excalibur Technologies{{cite press release

Annual revenues for RetrievalWare peaked in 2001 at around $40 million US dollars.{{citation

Use of natural language techniques

RetrievalWare is a relevancy ranking text search system with processing enhancements drawn from the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and semantic networks. NLP algorithms include dictionary-based stemming (also known as lemmatisation) and dictionary-based phrase identification. Semantic networks are used by RetrievalWare to expand the query words entered by the user to related terms with terms weights determined by the distance from the user's original terms. In addition to automatic expansion, a feedback-mode whereby users could choose the meaning of the word before performing the expansion was available. The first semantic networks were built using WordNet.

In addition, RetrievalWare implemented a form of n-gram search (branded as APRP - Adaptive Pattern Recognition Processing), designed to search over documents with OCR errors. Query terms are divided into sets of 2-grams which are used to locate similarly matching terms from the inverted index. The resulting matches are weighted based on similarly measures and then used to search for documents.

All of these features were available no later than 1993 and ConQuest software has claimed that it was the first commercial text-search system to implement these techniques.{{cite press release

Other notable features

Other notable features of RetrievalWare include distributed search servers, synchronizers for indexing external content management systems and relational databases,{{cite news

Participation in TREC

RetrievalWare participated in the Text REtrieval Conference in 1992 (TREC-1), 1993 (TREC-2), and 1995 (TREC-4).

In TREC-1 and TREC-4, the RetrievalWare runs for manually entered queries produced the best results based on the 11-point averages over all search engines which participated in the ad hoc category where search engines are allowed a single opportunity to process previously unknown queries against an existing database.

References

References

1. "Paul Nelson, Innovation Lead, Content Analytics at Accenture Analytics".
2. (23 July 2011). "Arden & Ken". comcast.net.
3. "Ed Addison, Serial Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist, Business Executive, Professor".
4. [http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Excalibur+Announces+Excalibur+RetrievalWare+6.5+Featuring+...-a019849416 Excalibur Announces Excalibur RetrievalWare 6.5 Featuring RetrievalWare FileRoom] - Contains a description of APRP
5. [https://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec2/papers/txt/25.txt Site Report for the Text REtrieval Conference by ConQuest Software Inc. (TREC2)] - Find the complete proceedings [http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec2/t2_proceedings.html here]
6. (1998). "Proceedings of the 36th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -". dl.acm.org.
7. [https://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec1/papers/21.txt Site Report for the Text REtrieval Conference by ConQuest Software Inc. (TREC-1)] - Find the complete proceedings [http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec1/t1_proceedings.html here]
8. [https://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec4/papers/excalibur.ps.gz The Excalibur TREC-4 System, Preparations, and Results] - A PDF version of which can be found [https://www.pnelsoncomposer.com/writings/excalibur-trec4.pdf here] {{Webarchive. link. (2010-11-27 and the complete proceedings can be found [http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec4/t4_proceedings.html here])