Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science 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.
In computing, a search engine is an information retrieval software system designed to help find information stored on one or more computer systems. Search engines discover, crawl, transform, and store information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The most widely used type of search engine is a web search engine, which searches for information on the World Wide Web.
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland, and was founded in 1988 through legislation sponsored by US Congressman Claude Pepper.
Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. Those involved in MIR may have a background in academic musicology, psychoacoustics, psychology, signal processing, informatics, machine learning, optical music recognition, computational intelligence or some combination of these.
A query language, also known as data query language or database query language (DQL), is a computer language used to make queries in databases and information systems. In database systems, query languages rely on strict theory to retrieve information. A well known example is the Structured Query Language (SQL).
A metasearch engine is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users.
Content-based image retrieval, also known as query by image content and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR), is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching for digital images in large databases. Content-based image retrieval is opposed to traditional concept-based approaches.
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) and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and began in 1992 as part of the TIPSTER Text program. Its purpose is to support and encourage research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies and to increase the speed of lab-to-product transfer of technology.
Musipedia is a search engine for identifying pieces of music. This can be done by whistling a theme, playing it on a virtual piano keyboard, tapping the rhythm on the computer keyboard, or entering the Parsons code. Anybody can modify the collection of melodies and enter MIDI files, bitmaps with sheet music, lyrics or some text about the piece, or the melodic contours as Parsons Code. Certain features on the site may no longer work due to reliance on flash which became defunct in 2020.
Multimedia search enables information search using queries in multiple data types including text and other multimedia formats. Multimedia search can be implemented through multimodal search interfaces, i.e., interfaces that allow to submit search queries not only as textual requests, but also through other media. We can distinguish two methodologies in multimedia search:
Search engine indexing is the collecting, parsing, and storing of data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, and computer science. An alternate name for the process, in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet, is web indexing.
Voice search, also called voice-enabled search, allows the user to use a voice command to search the Internet, a website, or an app. In a broader definition, voice search includes open-domain keyword query on any information on the Internet, for example in Google Voice Search, Cortana, Siri and Amazon Echo. Voice search is often interactive, involving several rounds of interaction that allows a system to ask for clarification. Voice search is a type of dialog system. Voice search is not a replacement for typed search. Rather the search terms, experience and use cases can differ heavily depending on the input type.
An audio search engine is a web-based search engine which crawls the web for audio content. The information can consist of web pages, images, audio files, or another type of document. Various techniques exist for research on these engines.
Computational creativity is a multidisciplinary endeavour that is located at the intersection of the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and the arts.
Pop music automation is a field of study among musicians and computer scientists with a goal of producing successful pop music algorithmically. It is often based on the premise that pop music is especially formulaic, unchanging, and easy to compose. The idea of automating pop music composition is related to many ideas in algorithmic music, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computational creativity.
Tunebot is a music search engine developed by the Interactive Audio Lab at Northwestern University. Users can search the database by humming or singing a melody into a microphone, playing the melody on a virtual keyboard, or by typing some of the lyrics. This allows users to finally identify that song that was stuck in their head.
In linguistic morphology and information retrieval, stemming is the process of reducing inflected words to their word stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root. Algorithms for stemming have been studied in computer science since the 1960s. Many search engines treat words with the same stem as synonyms as a kind of query expansion, a process called conflation.
Doreso is an automatic content recognition (ACR) company specialized in music discovery and social TV recognition service for the second screen. Their sound-to-sound music search engine allows users to obtain more detailed information about music and songs by singing, humming or by recording original music.
A 3D Content Retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving three dimensional digital contents from a large database of digital images. The most original way of doing 3D content retrieval uses methods to add description text to 3D content files such as the content file name, link text, and the web page title so that related 3D content can be found through text retrieval. Because of the inefficiency of manually annotating 3D files, researchers have investigated ways to automate the annotation process and provide a unified standard to create text descriptions for 3D contents. Moreover, the increase in 3D content has demanded and inspired more advanced ways to retrieve 3D information. Thus, shape matching methods for 3D content retrieval have become popular. Shape matching retrieval is based on techniques that compare and contrast similarities between 3D models.
Search by sound is the retrieval of information based on audio input. There are a handful of applications, specifically for mobile devices that utilize search by sound. Shazam, Soundhound, Axwave, ACRCloud and others have seen considerable success by using a simple algorithm to match an acoustic fingerprint to a song in a library. These applications take a sample clip of a song, or a user-generated melody and check a music library/music database to see where the clip matches with the song. From there, song information will be queried and displayed to the user.
