[Sigia-l] RE: first principals

Avi Rappoport analyst at searchtools.com
Fri Mar 14 17:05:42 EST 2003


In my experience, Information Retrieval is about a great deal more 
than natural-language processing.  Many IR people do research on 
algorithms such as Latent Semantic Analysis, vector spaces, and other 
measures of similarity, as well as broader issues of distributed and 
federated retrieval, aboutness, information needs, visualization, 
cognition, citation analysis, user experience, alterting and 
collaborative filtering, and much more.

All this is fundamentally related to IA in interesting ways, 
providing a lot of fascinating if somewhat technical basic research.

My favorite IR book is

Modern Information Retrieval, Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier 
Ribeiro-Neto. Addison Wesley, 1999.

Avi

At 1:35 PM -0500 3/14/03, Anne Hjortshoj wrote:
>Not a library scientist, but I believe they are two perspectives on the same
>task. The computer science view isn't concerned with the user's view of the
>data, but concentrates on back-end processes.
>
>The same term is also used in library science, I think.
>
>-Anne
>
>p.s. see
>http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/020139829X/ref%3Dbr%5Flf%5Fw%5Fh%5F
>%5F8/026-6437479-4108460 for a book on this topic.
>
>p.p.s. My husband is a computer science guy concentrating on IR stuff. He
>runs into library science people all the time at conferences.
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Jesse James Garrett" <jjg at jjg.net>
>
>>  Anne Hjortshoj wrote:
>>  > Just a note - IR (Information Retrieval) is an area of computer science
>>  > dealing with natural language processing. Not to get bogged down in
>>  > semantics, and not to suggest that it can't also be used in the field of
>IA
>>  > ... just wanted to point out that the term is already in use in another
>>  > field.
>>
>>  This seems (to my untrained eye) different from the sense in which this
>>  term is applied by library science. Perhaps one of our resident
>  > librarians can clarify the distinction between lib-sci IR and comp-sci IR?
>
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