Information retrieval (IR) is the process of obtaining information system 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 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.
An information retrieval (IR) query language is a query language used to make queries into search index. A query language is formally defined in a context-free grammar (CFG) and can be used by users in a textual, visual/UI or speech form. Advanced query languages are often defined for professional users in vertical search engines, so they get more control over the formulation of queries.
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. LSA assumes that words that are close in meaning will occur in similar pieces of text. A matrix containing word counts per document is constructed from a large piece of text and a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to reduce the number of rows while preserving the similarity structure among columns. Documents are then compared by taking the cosine of the angle between the two vectors formed by any two columns. Values close to 1 represent very similar documents while values close to 0 represent very dissimilar documents.
Document retrieval is defined as the matching of some stated user query against a set of free-text records. These records could be any type of mainly unstructured text, such as newspaper articles, real estate records or paragraphs in a manual. User queries can range from multi-sentence full descriptions of an information need to a few words.
In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts represented in databases.
In information retrieval, tf–idf, TF*IDF, or TFIDF, short for term frequency–inverse document frequency, is a numerical statistic that is intended to reflect how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus. It is often used as a weighting factor in searches of information retrieval, text mining, and user modeling. The tf–idf value increases proportionally to the number of times a word appears in the document and is offset by the number of documents in the corpus that contain the word, which helps to adjust for the fact that some words appear more frequently in general. tf–idf is one of the most popular term-weighting schemes today. A survey conducted in 2015 showed that 83% of text-based recommender systems in digital libraries use tf–idf.
The (standard) Boolean model of information retrieval (BIR) is a classical information retrieval (IR) model and, at the same time, the first and most-adopted one. It is used by many IR systems to this day. The BIR is based on Boolean logic and classical set theory in that both the documents to be searched and the user's query are conceived as sets of terms. Retrieval is based on whether or not the documents contain the query terms.
Query expansion (QE) is the process of reformulating a given query to improve retrieval performance in information retrieval operations, particularly in the context of query understanding. In the context of search engines, query expansion involves evaluating a user's input and expanding the search query to match additional documents. Query expansion involves techniques such as:
A web search query is a query based on a specific search term that a user enters into a web search engine to satisfy their information needs. Web search queries are distinctive in that they are often plain text or hypertext with optional search-directives. They vary greatly from standard query languages, which are governed by strict syntax rules as command languages with keyword or positional parameters.
A concept search is an automated information retrieval method that is used to search electronically stored unstructured text for information that is conceptually similar to the information provided in a search query. In other words, the ideas expressed in the information retrieved in response to a concept search query are relevant to the ideas contained in the text of the query.
Ranking of query is one of the fundamental problems in information retrieval (IR), the scientific/engineering discipline behind search engines. Given a query q and a collection D of documents that match the query, the problem is to rank, that is, sort, the documents in D according to some criterion so that the "best" results appear early in the result list displayed to the user. Ranking in terms of information retrieval is an important concept in computer science and is used in many different applications such as search engine queries and recommender systems. A majority of search engines use ranking algorithms to provide users with accurate and relevant results.
Vector space model or term vector model is an algebraic model for representing text documents as vectors of identifiers. It is used in information filtering, information retrieval, indexing and relevancy rankings. Its first use was in the SMART Information Retrieval System.
XML retrieval, or XML information retrieval, is the content-based retrieval of documents structured with XML. As such it is used for computing relevance of XML documents.
Collaborative tagging, also known as social tagging or folksonomy, allows users to apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. It has been argued that these tagging systems can provide navigational cues or "way-finders" for other users to explore information. The notion is that given that social tags are labels users create to represent topics extracted from online documents, the interpretation of these tags should allow other users to predict the contents of different documents efficiently. Social tags are arguably more important in exploratory search, in which the users may engage in iterative cycles of goal refinement and exploration of new information, and interpretation of information contents by others will provide useful cues for people to discover topics that are relevant.
Learning to rank or machine-learned ranking (MLR) is the application of machine learning, typically supervised, semi-supervised or reinforcement learning, in the construction of ranking models for information retrieval systems. Training data consists of lists of items with some partial order specified between items in each list. This order is typically induced by giving a numerical or ordinal score or a binary judgment for each item. The ranking model purposes to rank, i.e. producing a permutation of items in new, unseen lists in a similar way to rankings in the training data.
The Extended Boolean model was described in a Communications of the ACM article appearing in 1983, by Gerard Salton, Edward A. Fox, and Harry Wu. The goal of the Extended Boolean model is to overcome the drawbacks of the Boolean model that has been used in information retrieval. The Boolean model doesn't consider term weights in queries, and the result set of a Boolean query is often either too small or too big. The idea of the extended model is to make use of partial matching and term weights as in the vector space model. It combines the characteristics of the Vector Space Model with the properties of Boolean algebra and ranks the similarity between queries and documents. This way a document may be somewhat relevant if it matches some of the queried terms and will be returned as a result, whereas in the Standard Boolean model it wasn't.
Fuzzy retrieval techniques are based on the Extended Boolean model and the Fuzzy set theory. There are two classical fuzzy retrieval models: Mixed Min and Max (MMM) and the Paice model. Both models do not provide a way of evaluating query weights, however this is considered by the P-norms algorithm.
The Binary Independence Model (BIM) is a probabilistic information retrieval technique that makes some simple assumptions to make the estimation of document/query similarity probability feasible.
Query understanding is the process of inferring the intent of a search engine user by extracting semantic meaning from the searcher’s keywords. Query understanding methods generally take place before the search engine retrieves and ranks results. It is related to natural language processing but specifically focused on the understanding of search queries. Query understanding is at the heart of technologies like Amazon Alexa, Apple's Siri. Google Assistant, IBM's Watson, and Microsoft's Cortana.
