Decomposing Text Processing for Retrieval: Cheshire tries GRID@CLEF

This short paper is a work in progress describing our participation in the GRID@CLEF task. The GRID@CLEF task is intended to capture in XML form the intermediate results of the text processing phases of the indexing process used by IR systems. Our approach was to create a new instrumented version of the indexing program used with the Cheshire II system. Thanks to an extension by the organizers, we were able to submit runs derived from our system. The system used for this task is a modified version of the Cheshire II IR system, to which output files for the different intermediate streams have been added. The additions, like the original system were written in C. Developing this system required creating parallel modules for several elements of the Cheshire II indexing programs. The current version handles the simplest processing cases, and currently ignores the many specialized indexing modes in the system (such as geographic name extraction and georeferencing).