We are pleased to announce the availability of the Lemur Toolkit for
Language Modeling and Information Retrieval, version 1.0.  

The Lemur Toolkit is designed to help carry out research in such
technologies as ad hoc and distributed retrieval, cross-language IR,
summarization, filtering, and classification. The toolkit supports
indexing of large-scale text databases, the construction of simple
language models for documents, queries, or subcollections, and the
implementation of retrieval systems based on language models as well
as a variety of other retrieval models.

The system is written in the C and C++ languages, and is designed as a
research system to run under Unix operating systems, although it can
also run under Windows.  The toolkit is available from the Web site
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lemur, which includes full documentation.

We hope that the toolkit will prove to be of use to the research
community.  Questions, feedback and comments on the toolkit are
welcome; please send us mail at lemur-project@cs.cmu.edu.


Jamie Callan
John Lafferty
Thi Nhu Truong
Chengxiang Zhai