Introduction to IR

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Introduction to IR

• Dr. Ying Xie

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Information Retrieval Systems
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Information Retrieval Definition

• The study of systems for indexing, searching, and
  recalling data, particularly text or other
  unstructured forms (e.g., HTML, XML, Images).

Databases vs. IR
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Information Retrieval Process
Documents
Information Need
Formulation
Indexing
Query Rep
Inverted index
Ranking
Ranked List
Learning
User Relevance Feedback
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IR at the Center of the Stage

• Decades ago, IR was the field mainly for
  librarians and information experts.
• In the beginning of 1990s, a single fact push the
  IR to the center of the stage
• The introduction of the World Wide Web

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• 1989, Tim Berners-Lee (MIT) invents the WWW
• The Web becomes a universal repository of human
  knowledge and culture
• The success of the WWW lies largely on its
  uniform, user-friendly interface for accessing
  multi-media internet resources in a
  hypertext-format.
• The WWW was evolved into the largest publishing
  medium accessible to everybody.
• Furthermore, the WWW change the ways that people
  perform their daily actives
• - home shopping
• - home banking
• - Distance learning
• - E-government
• - E-Medicine

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• Despite its success, the WWW also brings a big
  challenge.
• Drowning in information, starving in knowledge
• It is very challenging to retrieve useful
  information and extract interesting knowledge
  from the WWW due to its astounding size,
  unstructured content, and dynamic natures.

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• There is no ultimate solution to this problem
• But IR and related techniques are promising.

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• Significant dropping prices for external storage
  prompt institutes to digitalize their huge
  archives.
• Once digitalized, whats next?
• IR is the key tool to handle digitalized
  information

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So, what is this course about

• Information Retrieval
• Related technologies
• - Web mining
• - Recommender System
• - Text summarization
• - Social Network analysis
• - question answering

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How I teach this course

• I will guide you into this amazing field.
• I will introduce to you some interesting IR tools
• I will emphasize hands-on experiences.

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Where is the course information

• http//science.kennesaw.edu/yxie2/CSIS4491/CSIS44
  91M.htm