ANVIL is an information retrieval system using natural language processing techniques, intended for retrieval of captioned images. It extracts dependency structures from the image captions and user queries, and then applies a high accuracy matching algorithm which recursively explores the dependency structures to determine their similarity. A further algorithm allows additional contextual information to be extracted following a successful match, with the intention of helping users understand and organise the retrieval results. ANVIL was developed to high engineering standards, and as well as looking at the research aspects of the system, we also look at some of the design and development issues. English and Japanese versions of the system have been developed.