In this paper we report on our natural language informa- tion retrieval (NLIR) project as related to the recently concluded 5th Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-5). The main thrust of this project is to use natural language processing techniques to enhance the effectiveness of full-text document retrieval. One of our goals was to demonstrate that robust if relatively shallow NLP can help to derive a better representation of text documents for statistical search. Recently, we have turned our attention away from text representation issues and more towards query development problems. While our NLIR system still performs extensive natural language pro- cessing in order to extract phrasal and other indexing terms, our focus has shifted to the problems of building effective search queries. Specif...

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