ISR11 The SMART System -- Retrieval Results and Future Plans chapter G. Salton Harvard University Gerard Salton Use, reproduction, or publication, in whole or in part, is permitted for any purpose of the United States Government. I-1 I. The SMART System -- Retrieval Results and Future Plans G. Salton 1. Introduction The SMART system is a fully-automatic document retrieval system, capable of processing on a 7O[OCRerr] computer search requests and documents available in English, and of retrieving those documents most nearly similar to the corresponding queries. The machine programs, consisting of approximately 150,000 program steps, can be used not only for language analysis and retrieval, but also for the evaluation of search effectiveness by processing each search request in several different ways while comparing the results obtained in each case. The initial emphasis in the experimental runs performed with the SMART system was placed on the use of a large number of fully automatic language analysis procedures, including dictionary look-up as well as statistical and syntactic methods, and on the evaluation of the relative effectiveness of each procedure for indexing and search purposes. At the time of this writing, extensive experiments have been performed with four document collections in three subject areas documentation, computer science, and aerodynamics. Notwithstanding the apparent diversity in the subject matter treated, the search results were found to be basically the same in each of the three areas, in the sense that procedures which appear to operate well in one area also exhibit a superior performance in the others. Furthermore, a comparison of the automatic text analysis methods with the standard