Tipster was a program of research and development in the areas of information retrieval, extraction, and summarization, funded by DARPA and various other Government agencies from 1991 to 1998.
One part of this effort involved the creation of a standard architecture (standard interfaces) for systems doing information retrieval and extraction. As part of Phase II of Tipster (1994-96), this architecture was developed by a group of contractors and Government personnel (the Tipster Architecture Working Group), chaired by Ralph Grishman of NYU. Some further refinements to the architecture were made in Phase III (1996-98) through a set of Tipster Architecture Working Groups.
The architecture is described by an architecture design document. The last version of the design document prepared at NYU, Tipster Phase II Architecture Design Document, version 1.52, was prepared on July 7, 1995. The C-language header file, tipster.h, which specifies the C interface for Tipster operations, in included in the Design Document.
Subsequent revisions of the design document may be found at the Government-maintained Tipster Web Site.
For an overview of the Tipster architecture, you may also want to browse through the Architecture presentation slides used at the 12-month Tipster meeting, May 17-19, 1995.
Several additional documents were prepared by the Tipster Architecture Committee (which consists of representatives of the Government agencies involved in the Tipster program) to define the goals of the architecture effort and the process for qualifying systems as "Tipster compliant". These may also be found at the Tipster Web Site.
There have been several implementations of Tipster Architecture-compliant systems, including GATE, developed at the University of Sheffield, which is free for research purposes, and comes in source and binary form for common platforms.
(For information about other natural language processing research at the NYU Proteus Project, click here).
Last updated October 20 1998 by R. Grishman (grishman@cs.nyu.edu)