About The Lemur Project

The Lemur Project was started in 2000 by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University. Over the years, a large number of UMass and CMU students and staff have contributed to the project. The project's first product was the Lemur Toolkit, a collection of software tools and search engines designed to support research on using statistical language models for information retrieval tasks. Later the project added the Indri search engine for large-scale search, the Lemur Query Log Toolbar for capture of user interaction data, and the ClueWeb09 dataset for research on web search.

The Lemur Project typically makes its major software releases in June and December of each year. Minor software releases are done as necessary.

Most of the Lemur Project's activity continues to be at the University of Massachusetts and Carnegie Mellon University, however the project welcomes software, documentation, data, and other contributions from the broader Lemur community.