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Information Retrieval

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Document retrieval; Text retrieval

Definition

Information retrieval (IR) deals with the construction of automatic systems that allow users to inquire about textual data of any kind through natural language queries. The retrieved information from IR systems may vary from a ranked list of relevant textual items of any kind, such as full documents or their excerpts, or can be distilled into more elaborated forms, such as document summaries or answers to questions. Information retrieval is an empirical science that studies representation, storage, and access to information and covers a large number of interdisciplinary topics of theoretical computer science including information theory, machine learning, coding theory, probability theory, programming theory, computational semantics, natural language processing, logics, and algebra. From a practical perspective, research on IR includes data representation; storage and retrieval, such as indexing, data encoding, and text...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Rome, Italy

    Giambattista Amati

Authors
  1. Giambattista Amati
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giambattista Amati .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Rome, Italy

    Giambattista Amati

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Amati, G. (2018). Information Retrieval. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_915

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