ANVIL is a system designed for the retrieval of images annotated with short captions. It uses NLP techniques to extract dependency structures from captions and queries, and then applies a robust matching algorithm to recursively explore and compare them. There are currently two main interfaces to ANVIL: a list-based display and a 2D spatial layout that allows users to interact with and navigate between similar images. ANVIL was designed to operate as part of a publicly accessible, WWW-based image retrieval server. Consequently, product-level engineering standards were required. This paper examines both the research aspects of the system and also looks at some of the design and evaluation issues.
