SENTINEL: A Multiple Engine Information Retrieval and Visualization System

We describe a prototype Information Retrieval system, SENTINEL, under development at Harris Corporation’s Information Systems Division. SENTINEL is a fusion of multiple information retrieval technologies, integrating n-grams, a vector space model, and a neural network training rule. One of the primary advantages of SENTINEL is its 3-dimenstional visualization capability that is based fully upon the mathematical representation of information within SENTINEL. This 3-dimensional visualization capability provides users with an intuitive understanding, with relevance feedback/query refinement techniques that can be better utilized, resulting in higher retrieval accuracy (precision).