The history of information retrieval research

This paper describes a brief history of the research and development of information retrieval systems starting with the creation of electromechanical searching devices, through to the early adoption of computers to search for items that are relevant to a user's query. The advances achieved by information retrieval researchers from the 1950s through to the present day are detailed next, focusing on the process of locating relevant information. The paper closes with speculation on where the future of information retrieval lies

[Review of] Francesco Cordasco (Ed.), Italian Americans: A Guide to Information Sources

The great proliferation of knowledge that has caused a problem of control and retrieval of that knowledge has caught up with the expanding field of research in ethnic-immigration history. Francesco Cordasco’s newly edited work, Italian Americans: A Guide to Information Sources, therefore is a major contribution in the field. The student of ethnic-immigration history and the related social sciences will find it a useful tool because it is the most comprehensive up-to-date bibliographical register on the Italian Americans. The book is Volume 2 in Gale\u27s Ethnic Studies Information Guide Series dealing with ethnic groups in the United States

Open-Retrieval Conversational Question Answering

Conversational search is one of the ultimate goals of information retrieval. Recent research approaches conversational search by simplified settings of response ranking and conversational question answering, where an answer is either selected from a given candidate set or extracted from a given passage. These simplifications neglect the fundamental role of retrieval in conversational search. To address this limitation, we introduce an open-retrieval conversational question answering (ORConvQA) setting, where we learn to retrieve evidence from a large collection before extracting answers, as a further step towards building functional conversational search systems. We create a dataset, OR-QuAC, to facilitate research on ORConvQA. We build an end-to-end system for ORConvQA, featuring a retriever, a reranker, and a reader that are all based on Transformers. Our extensive experiments on OR-QuAC demonstrate that a learnable retriever is crucial for ORConvQA. We further show that our system can make a substantial improvement when we enable history modeling in all system components. Moreover, we show that the reranker component contributes to the model performance by providing a regularization effect. Finally, further in-depth analyses are performed to provide new insights into ORConvQA.Comment: Accepted to SIGIR'2

A heuristic information retrieval study : an investigation of methods for enhanced searching of distributed data objects exploiting bidirectional relevance feedback

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of LutonThe primary aim of this research is to investigate methods of improving the effectiveness of current information retrieval systems. This aim can be achieved by accomplishing numerous supporting objectives. A foundational objective is to introduce a novel bidirectional, symmetrical fuzzy logic theory which may prove valuable to information retrieval, including internet searches of distributed data objects. A further objective is to design, implement and apply the novel theory to an experimental information retrieval system called ANACALYPSE, which automatically computes the relevance of a large number of unseen documents from expert relevance feedback on a small number of documents read. A further objective is to define a methodology used in this work as an experimental information retrieval framework consisting of multiple tables including various formulae which anow a plethora of syntheses of similarity functions, ternl weights, relative term frequencies, document weights, bidirectional relevance feedback and history adjusted term weights. The evaluation of bidirectional relevance feedback reveals a better correspondence between system ranking of documents and users' preferences than feedback free system ranking. The assessment of similarity functions reveals that the Cosine and Jaccard functions perform significantly better than the DotProduct and Overlap functions. The evaluation of history tracking of the documents visited from a root page reveals better system ranking of documents than tracking free information retrieval. The assessment of stemming reveals that system information retrieval performance remains unaffected, while stop word removal does not appear to be beneficial and can sometimes be harmful. The overall evaluation of the experimental information retrieval system in comparison to a leading edge commercial information retrieval system and also in comparison to the expert's golden standard of judged relevance according to established statistical correlation methods reveal enhanced system information retrieval effectiveness

On Birthing Dancing Stars: The Need for Bounded Chaos in Information Interaction

While computers causing chaos is acommon social trope, nearly the entirety of the history of computing is dedicated to generating order. Typical interactive information retrieval tasks ask computers to support the traversal and exploration of large, complex information spaces. The implicit assumption is that they are to support users in simplifying the complexity (i.e. in creating order from chaos). But for some types of task, particularly those that involve the creative application or synthesis of knowledge or the creation of new knowledge, this assumption may be incorrect. It is increasingly evident that perfect order—and the systems we create with it—support highly-structured information tasks well, but provide poor support for less-structured tasks.We need digital information environments that help create a little more chaos from order to spark creative thinking and knowledge creation. This paper argues for the need for information systems that offerwhat we term ‘bounded chaos’, and offers research directions that may support the creation of such interface

Sampler of databases for searches in history

Journal ArticleTo review successfully the databases appropriate for historical research, some practical application is necessary. The following reviews of eight bibliographic databases emphasize their usefulness as practical research aids for topics in history. The comments are on only a selected number of the databases for history searching; additional ones are listed at the end of the reviews. The sample searches were conducted in files on the DIALOG Information Retrieval Service because all the authors were familiar with that system and all had access to it

Corposing a history of electronic music.

A current research project led by the author has collated nearly 2,000 historic electronic music works for the purposes of musicology; nonetheless, this collection is highly amenable to composition. New pieces can be realized by rendering a selected chronology of electronic music history. The context is a wider field of compositional endeavor in “corposition” over large audio databases especially opened up by new research in music information retrieval

Aslib: a de facto national library/information organization

The history of Aslib, an independent library/information membership organisation in the United Kingdom between 1924 and 2014, is outlined, with emphasis in the ways in Aslib acted as a de facto national centre for special librarianship and information work, for documentation, and for technical and commercial information. Its activities in this respect included publishing, training and professional development, research and consultancy, and the maintenance of national collections and indexes. Aslib was also an official national centre for several purposes, generally associated with information retrieval and dissemination