Information retrieval applications
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Information retrieval (IR) in
computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
and
information science Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of informatio ...
is the process of obtaining
information system An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people ...
resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on
full-text In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts ...
or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the
science Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...
of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for
databases In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...
of texts, images or sounds. Automated information retrieval systems are used to reduce what has been called information overload. An IR system is a software system that provides access to books, journals and other documents; stores and manages those documents.
Web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
s are the most visible IR applications.


Overview

An information retrieval process begins when a user or searcher enters a query into the system. Queries are formal statements of information needs, for example search strings in web search engines. In information retrieval a query does not uniquely identify a single object in the collection. Instead, several objects may match the query, perhaps with different degrees of
relevance Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sci ...
. An object is an entity that is represented by information in a content collection or
database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
. User queries are matched against the database information. However, as opposed to classical SQL queries of a database, in information retrieval the results returned may or may not match the query, so results are typically ranked. This
ranking A ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than" or "ranked equal to" the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak order or total preorder of ...
of results is a key difference of information retrieval searching compared to database searching. Depending on the application the data objects may be, for example, text documents, images, audio,
mind maps The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...
or videos. Often the documents themselves are not kept or stored directly in the IR system, but are instead represented in the system by document surrogates or metadata. Most IR systems compute a numeric score on how well each object in the database matches the query, and rank the objects according to this value. The top ranking objects are then shown to the user. The process may then be iterated if the user wishes to refine the query.


History

The idea of using computers to search for relevant pieces of information was popularized in the article '' As We May Think'' by
Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all warti ...
in 1945. It would appear that Bush was inspired by patents for a 'statistical machine' - filed by
Emanuel Goldberg Emanuel Goldberg ( he, עמנואל גולדברג; yi, עמנואל גאָלדבערג; russian: Эмануэль Гольдберг) (born: 31 August 1881; died: 13 September 1970) was an Israeli physicist and inventor. He was born in Moscow a ...
in the 1920s and '30s - that searched for documents stored on film. The first description of a computer searching for information was described by Holmstrom in 1948, detailing an early mention of the
Univac UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...
computer. Automated information retrieval systems were introduced in the 1950s: one even featured in the 1957 romantic comedy, Desk Set. In the 1960s, the first large information retrieval research group was formed by
Gerard Salton Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton (8 March 1927 in Nuremberg – 28 August 1995) was a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, an ...
at Cornell. By the 1970s several different retrieval techniques had been shown to perform well on small text corpora such as the Cranfield collection (several thousand documents). Large-scale retrieval systems, such as the Lockheed Dialog system, came into use early in the 1970s. In 1992, the US Department of Defense along with the
National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical s ...
(NIST), cosponsored the
Text Retrieval Conference The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) is an ongoing series of workshops focusing on a list of different information retrieval (IR) research areas, or ''tracks.'' It is co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) an ...
(TREC) as part of the TIPSTER text program. The aim of this was to look into the information retrieval community by supplying the infrastructure that was needed for evaluation of text retrieval methodologies on a very large text collection. This catalyzed research on methods that scale to huge corpora. The introduction of
web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
s has boosted the need for very large scale retrieval systems even further.


Applications

Areas where information retrieval techniques are employed include (the entries are in alphabetical order within each category):


General applications

*
Digital libraries A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital m ...
*
Information filtering An information filtering system is a system that removes redundant or unwanted information from an information stream using (semi)automated or computerized methods prior to presentation to a human user. Its main goal is the management of the inform ...
**
Recommender systems A recommender system, or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing 'system' with a synonym such as platform or engine), is a subclass of information filtering system that provide suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular ...
* Media search ** Blog search **
Image retrieval An image retrieval system is a computer system used for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as captio ...
**
3D retrieval A 3D Content Retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving three dimensional digital contents (e.g.: Computer-aided design, molecular biology models, and cultural heritage 3D scenes, etc.) from a large database of di ...
** Music retrieval ** News search ** Speech retrieval ** Video retrieval *
Search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
** Site search **
Desktop search Desktop search tools search within a user's own computer files as opposed to searching the Internet. These tools are designed to find information on the user's PC, including web browser history, e-mail archives, text documents, sound files, images ...
**
Enterprise search Enterprise search is the practice of making content from multiple enterprise-type sources, such as databases and intranets, searchable to a defined audience. "Enterprise search" is used to describe the software of search information within an ente ...
** Federated search **
Mobile search Mobile may refer to: Places * Mobile, Alabama, a U.S. port city * Mobile County, Alabama * Mobile, Arizona, a small town near Phoenix, U.S. * Mobile, Newfoundland and Labrador Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels * Mobile ...
**
Social search Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram an ...
**
Web search Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...


Domain-specific applications

* Expert search finding * Genomic information retrieval *
Geographic information retrieval Geographic information retrieval (GIR) or geographical information retrieval systems are information retrieval, search tools for search engine, searching the Web, enterprise search, enterprise documents, and mobile local search that combine traditi ...
* Information retrieval for chemical structures * Information retrieval in
software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...
*
Legal information retrieval Legal information retrieval is the science of information retrieval applied to legal text, including legislation, case law, and scholarly works. Accurate legal information retrieval is important to provide access to the law to laymen and legal profe ...
*
Vertical search A vertical search engine is distinct from a general web search engine, in that it focuses on a specific segment of online content. They are also called specialty or topical search engines. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media ...


Other retrieval methods

Methods/Techniques in which information retrieval techniques are employed include: *
Adversarial information retrieval Adversarial information retrieval (adversarial IR) is a topic in information retrieval related to strategies for working with a data source where some portion of it has been manipulated maliciously. Tasks can include gathering, indexing, filtering ...
* Automatic summarization **
Multi-document summarization Multi-document summarization is an automatic procedure aimed at extraction of information from multiple texts written about the same topic. The resulting summary report allows individual users, such as professional information consumers, to quickl ...
*
Compound term processing Compound-term processing, in information-retrieval, is search result matching on the basis of compound terms. Compound terms are built by combining two or more simple terms; for example, "triple" is a single word term, but "triple heart bypass" is ...
* Cross-lingual retrieval *
Document classification Document classification or document categorization is a problem in library science, information science and computer science. The task is to assign a document to one or more classes or categories. This may be done "manually" (or "intellectually") ...
*
Spam filtering Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email). No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email (false positives) as opposed to ...
* Question answering


Model types

For effectively retrieving relevant documents by IR strategies, the documents are typically transformed into a suitable representation. Each retrieval strategy incorporates a specific model for its document representation purposes. The picture on the right illustrates the relationship of some common models. In the picture, the models are categorized according to two dimensions: the mathematical basis and the properties of the model.


First dimension: mathematical basis

* ''Set-theoretic'' models represent documents as sets of words or phrases. Similarities are usually derived from set-theoretic operations on those sets. Common models are: ** Standard Boolean model ** Extended Boolean model ** Fuzzy retrieval * ''Algebraic models'' represent documents and queries usually as vectors, matrices, or tuples. The similarity of the query vector and document vector is represented as a scalar value. **
Vector space model Vector space model or term vector model is an algebraic model for representing text documents (and any objects, in general) as vectors of identifiers (such as index terms). It is used in information filtering, information retrieval, indexing and ...
**
Generalized vector space model The Generalized vector space model is a generalization of the vector space model used in information retrieval. Wong ''et al.'' presented an analysis of the problems that the pairwise orthogonality assumption of the vector space model (VSM) creat ...
** (Enhanced) Topic-based Vector Space Model ** Extended Boolean model **
Latent semantic indexing Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the do ...
a.k.a.
latent semantic analysis Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the do ...
* ''Probabilistic models'' treat the process of document retrieval as a probabilistic inference. Similarities are computed as probabilities that a document is relevant for a given query. Probabilistic theorems like the Bayes' theorem are often used in these models. ** Binary Independence Model ** Probabilistic relevance model on which is based the okapi (BM25) relevance function ** Uncertain inference ** Language models ** Divergence-from-randomness model **
Latent Dirichlet allocation In natural language processing, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a generative statistical model that explains a set of observations through unobserved groups, and each group explains why some parts of the data are similar. The LDA is an ex ...
* ''Feature-based retrieval models'' view documents as vectors of values of ''feature functions'' (or just ''features'') and seek the best way to combine these features into a single relevance score, typically by
learning to rank Learning to rank. Slides from Tie-Yan Liu's talk at WWW 2009 conference aravailable online or machine-learned ranking (MLR) is the application of machine learning, typically supervised, semi-supervised or reinforcement learning, in the construc ...
methods. Feature functions are arbitrary functions of document and query, and as such can easily incorporate almost any other retrieval model as just another feature.


Second dimension: properties of the model

* ''Models without term-interdependencies'' treat different terms/words as independent. This fact is usually represented in vector space models by the orthogonality assumption of term vectors or in probabilistic models by an independency assumption for term variables. * ''Models with immanent term interdependencies'' allow a representation of interdependencies between terms. However the degree of the interdependency between two terms is defined by the model itself. It is usually directly or indirectly derived (e.g. by dimensional reduction) from the
co-occurrence In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of occurrence of two terms (also known as coincidence or concurrence) from a text corpus alongside each other in a certain order. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense ca ...
of those terms in the whole set of documents. * ''Models with transcendent term interdependencies'' allow a representation of interdependencies between terms, but they do not allege how the interdependency between two terms is defined. They rely an external source for the degree of interdependency between two terms. (For example, a human or sophisticated algorithms.)


Performance and correctness measures

The evaluation of an information retrieval system' is the process of assessing how well a system meets the information needs of its users. In general, measurement considers a collection of documents to be searched and a search query. Traditional evaluation metrics, designed for Boolean retrieval or top-k retrieval, include precision and recall. All measures assume a
ground truth Ground truth is information that is known to be real or true, provided by direct observation and measurement (i.e. empirical evidence) as opposed to information provided by inference. Etymology The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (s.v. "ground t ...
notion of relevance: every document is known to be either relevant or non-relevant to a particular query. In practice, queries may be
ill-posed The mathematical term well-posed problem stems from a definition given by 20th-century French mathematician Jacques Hadamard. He believed that mathematical models of physical phenomena should have the properties that: # a solution exists, # the sol ...
and there may be different shades of relevance.


Timeline

* Before the 1900s *: 1801: Joseph Marie Jacquard invents the Jacquard loom, the first machine to use punched cards to control a sequence of operations. *: 1880s:
Herman Hollerith Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, i ...
invents an electro-mechanical data tabulator using punch cards as a machine readable medium. *: 1890 Hollerith cards,
keypunch A keypunch is a device for precisely punching holes into stiff paper cards at specific locations as determined by keys struck by a human operator. Other devices included here for that same function include the gang punch, the pantograph punch, ...
es and tabulators used to process the 1890 US Census data. * 1920s-1930s *:
Emanuel Goldberg Emanuel Goldberg ( he, עמנואל גולדברג; yi, עמנואל גאָלדבערג; russian: Эмануэль Гольдберг) (born: 31 August 1881; died: 13 September 1970) was an Israeli physicist and inventor. He was born in Moscow a ...
submits patents for his "Statistical Machine” a document search engine that used photoelectric cells and pattern recognition to search the metadata on rolls of microfilmed documents. * 1940s–1950s *: late 1940s: The US military confronted problems of indexing and retrieval of wartime scientific research documents captured from Germans. *:: 1945:
Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all warti ...
's '' As We May Think'' appeared in '' Atlantic Monthly''. *:: 1947:
Hans Peter Luhn Hans Peter Luhn (July 1, 1896 – August 19, 1964) was a German researcher in the field of computer science and Library & Information Science for IBM, and creator of the Luhn algorithm, KWIC (Key Words In Context) indexing, and Selective ...
(research engineer at IBM since 1941) began work on a mechanized punch card-based system for searching chemical compounds. *: 1950s: Growing concern in the US for a "science gap" with the USSR motivated, encouraged funding and provided a backdrop for mechanized literature searching systems (
Allen Kent Allen Kent (October 24, 1921 – May 1, 2014) was an information scientist. Early life He was born in New York City.
ASIS&T obitu ...
''et al.'') and the invention of the
citation index A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebre ...
by
Eugene Garfield Eugene Eli Garfield (September 16, 1925 – February 26, 2017) was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create ''Current Contents'', ''Science Citation Index'' (SCI), ''Journ ...
. *: 1950: The term "information retrieval" was coined by
Calvin Mooers Calvin Northrup Mooers (October 24, 1919 – December 1, 1994), was an American computer scientist known for his work in information retrieval and for the programming language TRAC. Early life Mooers was a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, atte ...
. *: 1951: Philip Bagley conducted the earliest experiment in computerized document retrieval in a master thesis at
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
. *: 1955: Allen Kent joined Case Western Reserve University, and eventually became associate director of the Center for Documentation and Communications Research. That same year, Kent and colleagues published a paper in American Documentation describing the precision and recall measures as well as detailing a proposed "framework" for evaluating an IR system which included statistical sampling methods for determining the number of relevant documents not retrieved. *: 1958: International Conference on Scientific Information Washington DC included consideration of IR systems as a solution to problems identified. See: ''Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information, 1958'' (National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, 1959) *: 1959:
Hans Peter Luhn Hans Peter Luhn (July 1, 1896 – August 19, 1964) was a German researcher in the field of computer science and Library & Information Science for IBM, and creator of the Luhn algorithm, KWIC (Key Words In Context) indexing, and Selective ...
published "Auto-encoding of documents for information retrieval." * 1960s: *: early 1960s:
Gerard Salton Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton (8 March 1927 in Nuremberg – 28 August 1995) was a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, an ...
began work on IR at Harvard, later moved to Cornell. *: 1960: Melvin Earl Maron and John Lary Kuhns published "On relevance, probabilistic indexing, and information retrieval" in the Journal of the ACM 7(3):216–244, July 1960. *: 1962: *:* Cyril W. Cleverdon published early findings of the Cranfield studies, developing a model for IR system evaluation. See: Cyril W. Cleverdon, "Report on the Testing and Analysis of an Investigation into the Comparative Efficiency of Indexing Systems". Cranfield Collection of Aeronautics, Cranfield, England, 1962. *:* Kent published ''Information Analysis and Retrieval''. *: 1963: *:* Weinberg report "Science, Government and Information" gave a full articulation of the idea of a "crisis of scientific information." The report was named after Dr. Alvin Weinberg. *:* Joseph Becker and Robert M. Hayes published text on information retrieval. Becker, Joseph; Hayes, Robert Mayo. ''Information storage and retrieval: tools, elements, theories''. New York, Wiley (1963). *: 1964: *:*
Karen Spärck Jones Karen Sparck Jones is a computer science researcher and innovator who pioneered the search engine algorithm known as inverse document frequency (IDF). While many early information scientists and computer engineers were focused on developing progr ...
finished her thesis at Cambridge, ''Synonymy and Semantic Classification'', and continued work on computational linguistics as it applies to IR. *:* The
National Bureau of Standards The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...
sponsored a symposium titled "Statistical Association Methods for Mechanized Documentation." Several highly significant papers, including G. Salton's first published reference (we believe) to the
SMART Smart or SMART may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Smart'' (Hey! Say! JUMP album), 2014 * Smart (Hotels.com), former mascot of Hotels.com * ''Smart'' (Sleeper album), 1995 debut album by Sleeper * '' SMart'', a children's television se ...
system. *:mid-1960s: *::* National Library of Medicine developed MEDLARS Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System, the first major machine-readable database and batch-retrieval system. *::* Project Intrex at MIT. *:: 1965: J. C. R. Licklider published ''Libraries of the Future''. *:: 1966: Don Swanson was involved in studies at University of Chicago on Requirements for Future Catalogs. *: late 1960s: F. Wilfrid Lancaster completed evaluation studies of the MEDLARS system and published the first edition of his text on information retrieval. *:: 1968: *:* Gerard Salton published ''Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval''. *:* John W. Sammon, Jr.'s RADC Tech report "Some Mathematics of Information Storage and Retrieval..." outlined the vector model. *:: 1969: Sammon's
A nonlinear mapping for data structure analysis
" (IEEE Transactions on Computers) was the first proposal for visualization interface to an IR system. * 1970s *: early 1970s: *::* First online systems—NLM's AIM-TWX, MEDLINE; Lockheed's Dialog; SDC's ORBIT. *::*
Theodor Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and ''hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms '' transc ...
promoting concept of hypertext, published ''Computer Lib/Dream Machines''. *: 1971: Nicholas Jardine and Cornelis J. van Rijsbergen published "The use of hierarchic clustering in information retrieval", which articulated the "cluster hypothesis." *: 1975: Three highly influential publications by Salton fully articulated his vector processing framework and term discrimination model: *::* ''A Theory of Indexing'' (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) *::* ''A Theory of Term Importance in Automatic Text Analysis'' ( JASIS v. 26) *::* ''A Vector Space Model for Automatic Indexing'' ( CACM 18:11) *: 1978: The First ACM SIGIR conference. *: 1979: C. J. van Rijsbergen published ''Information Retrieval'' (Butterworths). Heavy emphasis on probabilistic models. *: 1979: Tamas Doszkocs implemented the CITE
natural language user interface Natural-language user interface (LUI or NLUI) is a type of computer human interface where linguistic phenomena such as verbs, phrases and clauses act as UI controls for creating, selecting and modifying data in software applications. In interface d ...
for MEDLINE at the National Library of Medicine. The CITE system supported free form query input, ranked output and relevance feedback.Doszkocs, T.E. & Rapp, B.A. (1979). "Searching MEDLINE in English: a Prototype User Interface with Natural Language Query, Ranked Output, and relevance feedback," In: Proceedings of the ASIS Annual Meeting, 16: 131-139. * 1980s *: 1980: First international ACM SIGIR conference, joint with British Computer Society IR group in Cambridge. *: 1982: Nicholas J. Belkin, Robert N. Oddy, and Helen M. Brooks proposed the ASK (Anomalous State of Knowledge) viewpoint for information retrieval. This was an important concept, though their automated analysis tool proved ultimately disappointing. *: 1983: Salton (and Michael J. McGill) published ''Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval'' (McGraw-Hill), with heavy emphasis on vector models. *: 1985: David Blair and Bill Maron publish: An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness for a Full-Text Document-Retrieval System *: mid-1980s: Efforts to develop end-user versions of commercial IR systems. *:: 1985–1993: Key papers on and experimental systems for visualization interfaces. *:: Work by
Donald B. Crouch Donald is a masculine given name derived from the Goidelic languages, Gaelic name ''Dòmhnall''.. This comes from the Proto-Celtic language, Proto-Celtic *''Dumno-ualos'' ("world-ruler" or "world-wielder"). The final -''d'' in ''Donald'' is part ...
, Robert R. Korfhage, Matthew Chalmers, Anselm Spoerri and others. *: 1989: First
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...
proposals by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. * 1990s *: 1992: First TREC conference. *: 1997: Publication of Korfhage's ''Information Storage and Retrieval'' with emphasis on visualization and multi-reference point systems. *: 1999: Publication of
Ricardo Baeza-Yates Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates (born March 21, 1961) is a Chilean- Catalan computer scientist that currently is a Research Professor at the Institute for Experiential AI of Northeastern University in the Silicon Valley campus. He is also part-time profe ...
and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto's ''Modern Information Retrieval'' by Addison Wesley, the first book that attempts to cover all IR. *: late 1990s:
Web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
s implementation of many features formerly found only in experimental IR systems. Search engines become the most common and maybe best instantiation of IR models.


Major conferences

* SIGIR
Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
* ECIR: European Conference on Information Retrieval * CIKM: Conference on Information and Knowledge Management * WWW:
International World Wide Web Conference The ACM Web Conference (formerly known as International World Wide Web Conference, abbreviated as WWW) is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. The first conference of many was hel ...
* WSDM
Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
* ICTIR
International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval


Awards in the field

*
Tony Kent Strix award Tony may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tony (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters * Gregory Tony (born 1978), American law enforcement officer * Motu Tony (born 1981), New Zealand international rugby leagu ...
* Gerard Salton Award * Karen Spärck Jones Award


See also

* * * * * * * * * ** ** ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


References


Further reading

* Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Berthier Ribeiro-Neto
Modern Information Retrieval: The Concepts and Technology behind Search (second edition)
. Addison-Wesley, UK, 2011. * Stefan Büttcher, Charles L. A. Clarke, and Gordon V. Cormack
Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines
. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2010. * * Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze
Introduction to Information Retrieval
Cambridge University Press, 2008.


External links


ACM SIGIR: Information Retrieval Special Interest GroupBCS IRSG: British Computer Society - Information Retrieval Specialist GroupText Retrieval Conference (TREC)Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE)
(online book) by C. J. van Rijsbergen
Information Retrieval Wiki

Information Retrieval Facility

Information Retrieval @ DUTHTREC report on information retrieval evaluation techniquesHow eBay measures search relevanceInformation retrieval performance evaluation tool @ Athena Research Centre
{{DEFAULTSORT:Information Retrieval Natural language processing