Spring+2006+Question+5+response

Spring 2006 Q 5

//Q: Information retrieval (IR) involves building technologies to make it easier for end users to get access to the information they want. Research in the field builds on earlier work as well as draws on research from many other disciplines. Briefly explain how IR has benefited from this interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Outline some promising future directions of study that could result from a closer interaction between researchers in IR and a field of your choice. Explain why you believe this would be productive and the kind of research activities that could be undertaken in such efforts to strengthen the interdisciplinary connections.//

Wendy: Ok, this was really daunting until i started thinking about it in terms of Recall and Precision. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval

IR has gotten better because we don't just use Boolean techniques; there's web-crawlers, metadata, folksomonies, etc. IR will keep getting better as computers become smarter: AI, word association, etc.