Lab report special section: Virginia Tech department of computer science information access laboratory

The Information Access Laboratory (IAL) at Virginia Tech (also called Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) is concerned with the fundamental human activity of accessing information. As such, it supports a wide variety of efforts in the computer, information and library science areas including IR and: algorithms and data structures [3, 11], computational linguistics [15], digital libraries [6, 7, 12], distributed processing [5, 8, 10], education [4], electronic publishing [6], HCI [14, 18], hypertext [9], multimedia [1, 17] and networking [1]. In the traditional IR side there has been a great deal of experimentation, including under the auspices of TREC, beginning with some of the earliest effective work on extended Boolean approaches [13, 16] and combining information sources [2].