Abstract
Information retrieval (IR) is about finding documents which may be of relevance to a user's query, from within a corpus or collection of texts. While apparently a simple task at first glance, IR is in fact a hard problem because of the subtleties introduced by the use of natural language in both documents and in queries. The automatic processing of natural language clearly represents significant potential for improving information retrieval tasks because of the dominance of the natural language medium on the whole IR task. Information extraction is also fundamentally about dealing with natural language albeit for a different function. It is thus of interest to the IE community to see how a related task, perhaps the most-related task, IR, has managed to use the same NLP base technology in its development so far. This is an especially valid comparison to make since IR has been the subject of research and development and has been delivering working solutions for many decades whereas IE is a more recent and emerging technology.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Belkin, N.J. and Croft, W.B.: Information Filtering and Information retrieval: Two Sides of the Same Coin? Communications of the ACM, 35(12), 29–38, 1992.
Belkin, N.J., Kantor, P., Fox, E.A., and Shaw, J.A.: Combining the Evidence of Multiple Query Representations for Information Retrieval. Information Processing & Management, 31(3), 431–448, 1995.
Church, K.W. and Rau, L: Commercial Applications of Natural Language Processing Communications of the ACM, 38(11), 71–79, 1995.
Cunningham, H.: Information Extraction — A User Guide. Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield Research Memo CS-97-02, January 1997.
Evans, D.A., Milić-Frayling, Lefferts, R.G.: CLARIT TRECA Experiments. in [11].
Foltz, P.W. and Dumais, S.T.: Personalised information Delivery: An Analysis of Information Filtering Methods. Communications of the ACM, 35(12), 51–60, 1992.
Furnas, G.W., Landauer, T.K., Gomez, L.M. and Dumais, S.T.: Analysis of the Potential Performance of Keyword Information systems. Bell Systems Technical Journal, 62(6), 1753–1806, 1983.
Furnas, G.W., Deerwester, S., Dumais, S.T., Landauer, T.K., Harshman, R.A., Streeter, R.A., and Lochbaum, K.E.: Information Retrieval Using a Singular Value decomposition Model of Latent Semantic Indexing. in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Grenoble, France, ACM Press, 465–480, 1988.
Gay, L.S. and Croft, W.B.: Interpreting Nominal Compounds for Information Retrieval. Information Processing & Management, 26(1), 21–38, 1990.
Harman, D.: How Effective is Suffixing ? Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(1), 7–15, 1991.
Harman, D.H. (Ed.): The Fourth Text Retrieval Conference. NIST Special Publication 500–236, 1996.
Harman, D.H. (Ed.): The Fifth Text Retrieval Conference. NIST Special Publication (in press), 1997.
Hull, D.: Stemming Algorithms — A Case Study for Detailed Evaluation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(1), 1.996.
Finding the Right Image: Content-Based Image Retrieval Systems. Special issue of IEEE Computer, V.N. Gudivada and V.V. Raghavan (Eds.), 28(9), 1995.
Kelledy, F. and Smeaton, A.F.: Phrase Indexing for Information Retrieval. In. Information retrieval Research, Aberdeen, 1997: Proceedings of the 19th Annual BCS-IRSG Colloquium on IR Research, London: Springer-Verlag, in press, 1997.
Lenat, D.B.: CYC: A Large-Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure. Communications of the ACM, 38(11), 33–38, 1995
Miller, G.A.: WordNet: A Lexical database for English. Communications of the ACM, 38(11), 39–41, 1995
Porter, M.F.: An Algorithm for Suffix Stripping. PROGRAM, 14, 130–137, 1980.
Robertson, S.E. and Sparck Jones, K.: Simple, Proven Approaches to Text Retrieval. Technical Report 356, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, 1996.
Salton, G.: Approaches to Passage retrieval in Full Text information Systems. in: Proceeedings of the 16th ACM-SIGIR. Conference, Pittsburgh, 1993, 49–58, ACM Press.
Sanderson, M.: Word Sense Disambiguation and Information Retrieval. in Proc. 17th Annual International ACM-SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Dublin, Ireland, 142–151, Springer-Verlag, 1994.
Sanderson, M.: Word Sense Disambiguation and Information Retrieval. PhD thesis, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland, 1997.
Singhal, A., Buckley, C. and Mitra, M.: Pivoted Document Length Normalization. in Proceedings of the 19th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Zürich, Switzerland, 21–29, ACM Press, 1996.
Smeaton, A.F.: Progress in the Application of NLP to Information Retrieval Tasks. The Computer Journal, 26(3), 268–278, 1992.
Smeaton, A.F. TREC-4 Experiments at Dublin City University: Thresholding Posting Lists, Query Expansion with WordNet and POS Tagging of Spanish. in [11].
Smeaton, A.F.: Using NLP or NLP Resources for Information Retrieval Tasks. in Natural Language Information Retrieval T. Strzalkowski (Ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, (in press), 1997.
Smeaton, A.F. and Harman, D.H.: TREC and its Impact on Europe ? Journal of Information Science, (in press) 1997.
Strzalkowski, T. and Carbello, J.P.: Natural Language Information Retrieval: TRECA Report. in [11].
van Rijsbergen, C.J.: Information Retrieval (2nd Edition). Butterworths, 1979.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Smeaton, A.F. (1997). Information retrieval: Still butting heads with natural language processing?. In: Pazienza, M.T. (eds) Information Extraction A Multidisciplinary Approach to an Emerging Information Technology. SCIE 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1299. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63438-X_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63438-X_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-63438-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69548-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive