Revisiting the Foundations of IR
Paul B. Kantor · 2015
As we face an explosion of potential new applications for the fundamental concepts and technologies of information retrieval, ranging from ad ranking to social media, from collaborative recommending to question answering systems, many researchers are spending unnecessary time reinventing ideas and relationships that are buried in the prehistory of information retrieval (which, for many researchers, means anything published before they entered graduate school). Much of today's received wisdom may be nothing more than the fossilized residue of lively debates concerning such things as . estimation of value and evaluation of systems. Returning to those discussions may open the door to genuinely new insights. On the other hand, of the ideas that surface as "new" in today's super-heated research environment have very firm roots in earlier developments in fields as diverse as citation analysis, statistics, and pattern recognition. The purpose of this tutorial is to survey those roots, and their relation to the contemporary fruits on the tree of information retrieval, and to separate, as much as is possible in an era of increasing commercial secrecy about methods, the problems to be solved, the algorithms for solving them, and the heuristics that are the bread and butter of a working operation.