INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Goals and Issues of IR

• Given query find documents to help answer query
• IR is not question - answering
• Helps summarize documents
• Links related documents
• Multi- and cross-lingual capabilities desirable
• Representation of knowledge (text or media?)
• Queries (type of query language)
• Evaluation methods (TREC SDR)

Components of an IR System

• Tokenization into words
• Removal of function words
• Phrase identification (noun phrases, names etc.)
• Feature weighting to indicate importance in text