Abstract. Design and development of information retrieval IR systems is a complex and expensive process. In the process of building an IR system, developers need to explore a large design space: on the one hand, they have to choose from a plethora of IR techniques developed due to the signi cant advances made in theoretical and experimental research in information retrieval; on the other hand, many of these techniques need to be tailored to the particular application in hand. Hence, an IR system implementation tool which allows exploration and composition of di erent IR system components1 is very valuable in building e ective and e cient IR systems. To construct such a tool, we need to develop modular and extensible IR components such that these components can be used in a mix and match fashion. This paper describes an extensible and modular framework which can be used to construct IR applications.
Joemon M. Jose, David G. Hendry, David J. Harper