Indri Retrieval UI Help

Getting Started

RetUI is a GUI based indri retrieval application. After opening an index or index server, enter your query in the "Enter your query" field and either click Search or press enter to run your query. You can change the number of documents returned in the "Number of documents" field. The retrieved documents will be listed in the lower table.

The "Database(s)" list shows all open indexes and index servers. If you want to remove an index or server, select it in the list (left click with your mouse) and then select "Remove Selected Index" from the File menu.

Selecting a document (left click with the mouse) in the lower table will raise the document display window. The document display window contains two panes. The top displays the query tree, the bottom displays the document text. Search terms from the query are highlighted in red in the document text. Initially, all matches from the query are highlighted. Selecting different nodes within the query tree will update the highlighting to reflect the selected node only.

If you receive a status message of the form "Out of Memory. Unable to open document" when selecting a document from the table, you will need to manually run java on the RetUI.jar file with addtional arguments to increase the memory available to java. The java virtual machine can run out of available memory when retrieving the text of large (multi-megabyte) documents. From a command prompt window, run:
javaw -Xmx512M -jar "C:\Program Files\Indri\lib\RetUI.jar"
where -Xmx specifies the maximum memory for java to use, 512 megabytes in the above example. If javaw is not found on your path, you will need to have windows search for javaw.exe. If you installed indri in a different location from the default, adjust the pathname to the jar file accordingly.

The document display window provides a File menu with the following items:

View as HTML
Pops up a new window with the current document text rendered as HTML. Note that hyperlinks can not be followed in this view. If the current document does not contain HTML markup, the view will be the plain text with all of the whitespace squeezed.
View Original
If your computer is running Windows, and if the current document was indexed from a local file on your computer, and it is a Word (doc), PowerPoint (ppt), or Adobe PDF (pdf) format document, the original document can be viewed with the corresponding program, if it is installed on your system. The program will remain running, even if you exit the Retrieval UI.

Selecting the "Clear" button will clear the query, document list, and document display window.

Selecting the "Show Scores" button will enable display of query scores in the results table. The button will then change to "Hide Scores". Selecting "Hide Scores" will disable the display of query scores in the results table.

Menus

RetUI has two menus, described below.

File Menu

Add Index
Adds a local index.
Add Server
Adds an indrid server running on some host.
Remove Selected Index
Remove an index or server from the set of open indexes and servers.
Quit
Exits RetUI

Help Menu

Help
Opens a window to view this help file. Any hyperlinks in this file will be opened in a separate window within a second window.
About
Displays the About Dialog.