SP500207 Application of the Automatic Message Router to the TIPSTER Collection chapter R. Jones S. Leung D.L. Pape National Institute of Standards and Technology Donna K. Harman Application of the Automatic Message Router to the TIPSTER Collection by Richard L Jones, Sek Kit Leung and D Lewis Pape Centre for Electronic Document Research ci- Computer Power POBox7l26 Canberra Mail Centre ACT 2610 AUSTRALIA Abstract The two expcrimcnts undertaken (CPGHC and CPGCN) investigated the applicability of technology developed in the Automatic Message Router Project (AMR) to the [OCRerr]PSThR data. AMR inverts the queries rather than the data; this is claimed to be an appropriate way of handling document routing given the ephemeral nature of documents in an electronic network. AMR's techniques of automatically identifying good discriminating terms and using the relative position of terms in documents as a means of developing a single relevance score proved to be very effective in producing good results in the experiment. Background The Centre for Electronic Research (CEDR) is based in Canberra, Australia. It is 5 laboratory in the Australian Computers and Communications Institute (ACCI), an organisation whose primary mission is to act as a link between Australian research in I.T. and the market-place. CEDR is the pnncipal contribution to ACCI by Computer Power Group (CPG), Australia's largest computer services company. It also continues an eight year R and D program by CPG into document analysis and retrieval techniques. The technology being tested in the TREC experiments has been developed in the Automatic Message Router Project, (AMR). AMR was developed over the past three years extending techniques called IQ, developed earlier by CPG for document retrieval, and incorporated in the STATUS document retrieval product since 1988. 245