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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 information. ...
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 or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the
science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...
of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases 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 sc ...
. 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 ...
. 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 o ...
of results is a key difference of information retrieval searching compared to database searching. Depending on the
application Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...
the data objects may be, for example, text documents, images, audio, mind maps 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 "As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged ...
'' 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 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 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 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 (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 * Information filtering ** Recommender systems * Media search ** Blog search ** Image retrieval ** 3D retrieval ** 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 ...
** Site search ** Desktop search ** Enterprise search ** Federated search ** Mobile search ** Social search ** Web search


Domain-specific applications

* Expert search finding * Genomic information retrieval * Geographic information retrieval * 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 * Vertical search


Other retrieval methods

Methods/Techniques in which information retrieval techniques are employed include: * Adversarial information retrieval * Automatic summarization ** Multi-document summarization * Compound term processing * Cross-lingual retrieval * Document classification * Spam filtering *
Question answering Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural ...


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
set Set, The Set, SET or SETS may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Mathematics *Set (mathematics), a collection of elements *Category of sets, the category whose objects and morphisms are sets and total functions, respectively Electro ...
s 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 an ...
** Generalized vector space model ** (Enhanced) Topic-based Vector Space Model ** Extended Boolean model ** Latent semantic indexing a.k.a. latent semantic analysis * ''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 * ''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 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 Dimensional reduction is the limit of a compactified theory where the size of the compact dimension goes to zero. In physics, a theory in ''D'' spacetime dimensions can be redefined in a lower number of dimensions ''d'', by taking all the fie ...
) from the co-occurrence 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 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 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 invents an electro-mechanical data tabulator using punch cards as a machine readable medium. *: 1890 Hollerith cards, keypunches and tabulators used to process the 1890 US Census data. * 1920s-1930s *: Emanuel Goldberg 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 "As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged ...
'' appeared in '' Atlantic Monthly''. *:: 1947: Hans Peter Luhn (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 ''et al.'') and the invention of the citation index by Eugene Garfield. *: 1950: The term "information retrieval" was coined by Calvin Mooers. *: 1951: Philip Bagley conducted the earliest experiment in computerized document retrieval in a master thesis at MIT. *: 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 published "Auto-encoding of documents for information retrieval." * 1960s: *: early 1960s: Gerard Salton 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 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 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 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 Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...
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 promoting concept of
hypertext Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references ( hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically ...
, published ''Computer Lib/Dream Machines''. *: 1971:
Nicholas Jardine Nicholas Jardine FBA (born 4 September 1943) is a British mathematician, philosopher of science and its history, historian of astronomy and natural history, and amateur mycologist. He is Emeritus Professor at the Department of History and Philo ...
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 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, 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 The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...
. * 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 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 * WSDM
Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
* ICTIR
International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval


Awards in the field

* Tony Kent Strix award * 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