Information Retrieval

System
19ECS441
Module 4

Tanvir H Sardar
Assistant Professor
Query Operations

Module 4
 Basic Concepts
• The User Task: to clearly define the IR need (the need
should not be vague)
• Example:
• A user interested in Car racing documents
• He can get different racing techniques and manufactures
details etc.
• This is “browsing” not “searching”: the objective is not
clearly mentioned and may change while browsing.
• Combining “browsing” not “searching” is not yet successful.
 Basic Concepts
• The User Task:
• Both query and retrieval tasks are “Pulling” action of WWW
• Alternative: automated retrieval using software agents
• Example: Only Relevant News are fed to the users based on
user recommendation
 Basic Concepts
• Logical view of documents:
• Historically. Documents are identified using keywords
• Keywords are directly obtained from the text or
provided by human experts
• This was the way to provide the logical view
 Basic Concepts
• Logical view of documents:
• Modern days, represent a document by using all
terms/words.
• Known as full text logical view.
• Steps: stop word elimination (a, the, you etc), stemming
(reduces distinct word with same grammatical roots),
identification of noun groups (eliminating adjectives,
adverbs, verbs).
• Most proper but high computation required
 Basic Concepts
• Logical view of documents:

Logical View of a document: from full text to a

set of index terms