Automated IR systems are used to reduce Information Overload . Many universities and Public Libraries use IR systems to provide access to books, journals, and other documents. IR systems are often related to object and query. Queries are formal statements of information needs that are put to an IR system by the user. An object is an entity which keeps or stores information in a database. User queries are matched to objects stored in the database. A document is, therefore, a data object. Often the documents themselves are not kept or stored directly in the IR system, but are instead represented in the system by document surrogates.
In 1992 the US Department of Defense, along with the National Institute Of Standards And Technology (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 such a huge evaluation of text retrieval methodologies.
Web Search Engine s such as Google , Yahoo Search or Live.com are the most visible IR applications.
There are several measures on the performance of an information retrieval system. The measures rely on a collection of documents and a query for which the relevancy of the documents is known. All common measures described here assume a ground truth notion of relevancy: 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 relevancy.
The proportion of retrieved ''and'' Relevant documents to all the documents retrieved:
|
where ''r'' is the rank, ''N'' the number retrieved, ''rel()'' a binary function on the relevance of a given rank, and ''P()'' precision at a given cut-off rank.
If there are several queries with known relevancies available, the ''mean average precision'' is the mean value of the average precisions computed for each of the queries separately.
For successful IR, it is necessary to represent the documents in some way. There are a number of models for this purpose. They can be categorized according to two dimensions like those shown in the figure on the right: the mathematical basis and the properties of the model. (translated from
German entry , original source
Dominik Kuropka )
- ''Models without term-interdependencies'' treat different terms/words as not interdependent. This fact is usually represented in vector space models by the Orthogonality assumption of term vectors or in Probabilistic Model s 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 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 relay an external source for the degree of interdependency between two terms. (For example a human or sophisticated algorithms.)
- 1890: Hollerith tabulating machines were used to analyze the US census. ( Herman Hollerith ).
- 1945: Vannevar Bush 's '' As We May Think '' appeared in '' Atlantic Monthly ''
- Late 1940s: The US military confronted problems of indexing and retrieval of wartime scientific research documents captured from Germans.
- 1947: Hans Peter Luhn (research engineer at IBM since 1941) began work on a mechanized, punch card based system for searching chemical compounds.
- 1950: The term "information retrieval" may have been coined by Calvin Mooers .
- 1950s: Growing concern in the US for a "science gap" with the SSSR motivated, encouraged funding, and provided a backdrop for mechanized literature searching systems ( Allen Kent et al) and the invention of citation indexing ( Eugene Garfield ).
- 1955: Allen Kent joined Case Western Reserve University , and eventually becomes associate director of the Center for Documentation and Communications Research.
- 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."
- 1960: Melvin Earl (Bill) Maron and J. L. Kuhns published "On relevance, probabilistic indexing, and information retrieval" in Journal of the ACM 7(3):216-244, July 1960.
- Early 1960s: Gerard Salton began work on IR at Harvard, later moved to Cornell.
- 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 Coll. of Aeronautics, Cranfield, England, 1962.
- 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 .
- 1963: Joseph Becker and Robert 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
- 1964: 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
- Mid-1960s: 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
- 1968: Gerard Salton published ''Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval''.
- 1968: J. W. Sammon '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.
- Late 1960s: F. W. Lancaster completed evaluation studies of the MEDLARS system and published the first edition of his text on information retrieval
- Early 1970s: first online systems--NLM's AIM-TWX, MEDLINE; Lockheed's Dialog; SDC's ORBIT
- Early 1970s: Theodor Nelson promoting concept of Hypertext , published Computer Lib/Dream Machines
- 1971: N. Jardine and C. J. Van Rijsbergen published "The use of hierarchic clustering in information retrieval", which articulated the "cluster hypothesis." (Information Storage and Retrieval, 7(5), pp. 217-240, Dec 1971)
- 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.
- 1980: First international ACM SIGIR conference, joint with British Computer Society IR group in Cambridge
- 1982: Belkin , Oddy, and 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 M. McGill) published Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval (McGraw-Hill), with heavy emphasis on vector models.
- 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 D. B. Crouch , Robert R. Korfhage , M. Chalmers , A. Spoerri and others.
- 1989: First World Wide Web proposals by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN .
- 1992: First TREC conference.
- 1997: Publication of Korfhage's ''Information Retrieval'' with emphasis on visualization and multi-reference point systems.
- Late 1990s: Web Search Engine implementation of many features formerly found only in experimental IR systems
- ASPseek
- iHOP Information retrieval system for the biomedical domain
- MEDIE An intelligent search engine, retrieving biomedical events from Medline.
- EBIMed Information retrieval (and extraction) system over Medline
- Info-PubMed Protein interaction database with 200,000 gene/protein names mined from Medline.
- Fluid Dynamics Search Engine (FDSE) A search engine written in Perl, freeware and shareware versions are available
- GalaTex XQuery Full-Text Search (XML query text search)
- [http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/source/ISR/isr.html Information Storage and Retrieval Using Mumps] (Online GPL Text)
- mnoGoSearch written in C , it can index web multilingual sites and many databases types.
- Sphinx Free SQL full-text search engine
- BioSpider Free metabolite/drug/protein information retrieval system (used in the annotation of DrugBank and the Human Metabolome Database)
Awards in this field:
Tony Kent Strix Award .
; 1983 -
Gerard Salton ,
Cornell University : "About the future of automatic information retrieval"
; 1988 -
Karen Spärck Jones ,
University Of Cambridge : "A look back and a look forward"
; 1991 -
Cyril Cleverdon ,
Cranfield Institute Of Technology : "The significance of the Cranfield tests on index languages"
; 1994 -
William S. Cooper ,
University Of California, Berkeley : "The formalism of probability theory in IR: a foundation or an encumbrance?"
; 1997 -
Tefko Saracevic ,
Rutgers University : "Users lost: reflections on the past, future, and limits of information science"
; 2000 -
Stephen E. Robertson ,
City University, London : "On theoretical argument in information retrieval"
; 2003 -
W. Bruce Croft ,
University Of Massachusetts, Amherst : "Information retrieval and computer science: an evolving relationship"
; 2006 -
C. J. Van Rijsbergen ,
University Of Glasgow , UK : "Quantum haystacks"
