Towards Universal Text Retrieval: Tipster Text Retrieval Research at New Mexico State University

New Mexico State University's Computing Research Lab has participated in research in all three phases of the US Government's Tipster program. Our work on information retrieval has focused on research and development of multilingual and cross-language approaches to automatic retrieval. The work on automatic systems has been supplemented by additional research into the role of the IR system user in interactive retrieval scenarios: monolingual, multilingual and cross-language. The combined efforts suggest that universal text retrieval, in which a user can find, access and use documents in the face of language differences and information overload, may be possible.