Modern Information Retrieval : A Brief Overview

Source Article

Singhal, Amit. (2001). “Modern Information Retrieval : A Brief Overview.” Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering. Web. Retrieved July 1, 2009, from Google. (http://singhal.info/ieee2001.pdf).

Abstract

Over the centuries, the need to store and retrieve information became an important factor to many people, especially with the advent of computers, storing and retrieving of large amount of information became a necessity. Due to that increasing demand, several works emerged in the mid 1950s up to know that elaborates the basic idea of searching with a computer, which gave birth to the field of Information Retrieval (IR). There are common models used in IR research which are the vector space model, probabilistic model, and inference network model. The vector space model is represented by a vector of terms. The probabilistic model estimates the probability of relevance of documents for a query. In the inference network model, the document retrieval is modeled as an inference process in an inference network. Various techniques and applications are being tried and tested all over the years and the evaluation of search effectiveness plays an important role in the field of IR to improve the retrieval effectiveness. This article discusses briefly the field of IR and its role as well as gives an overview on where it is now.

Learning

1. The study and learning of IR is important to all especially in this kind of information world we are living.

2. There are various techniques being tried and tested to ensure the effectiveness of IR search and retrieval processes.

3. Due to information overload, problems continue to arise like what is the most effective ways on storing and retrieving information.

Application

The knowledge in IR is significant to me as a librarian. I need to deliver the right information among our users/clients in this present time of information overload especially everything is almost clickable on the Internet and we are in the computer age. I need to explore more on the different search and retrieval processes continuously and know the trends in the field of IR for me to apply on my teaching about the topic “Searching the Internet”.

Techniques in Information Retrieval

1. Learn one or two search engines well. Read the help/tips screens on how to obtain search queries to obtain the best results.
2. To get fewer, more relevant results, use more search terms or terms with specific meaning and to get more results, use fewer search terms or terms with broader meaning.
3. Use phrase searching to narrow search to adjacent words ex. “Filipino authors”
4. Use field searching to limit your search to a particular field of the web page ex. allintitle: sonnets
5. Use stemming ex. User is searching for information on retrieval, will give information about retrieve, retrieved, retrieving, retriever, and so on.