In this paper we report progress on the development of ALLOY, a system that simplifies automatic document indexing and retrieval by combining techniques from several different approaches: expert, linguistic and statistical. The system is being designed to allow a panel of experts to create an ALLOY system for a given field by providing the necessary input that ALLOY needs to automatically index documents and to set up a convenient user interface. The input provided by the experts includes a hierarchy of concepts and an expert dictionary. The amount of information that the panel must provide for given field is considerably less than the amount required to build a complete thesaurus or knowledge base about that field.