Better Together: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Information Retrieval

The success of information retrieval systems depends critically on both the ability of systems to efficiently and effectively retrieve information, and to support people in articulating their information needs and making sense of the results. This interdisciplinary, user-centered perspective on information systems motivated my early work on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), which sought to mitigate the disagreement between the vocabulary that authors use in writing and searchers use to express their information needs, and continues to shape my research today. Over the last two decades, search has become a core fabric of people's everyday lives, driven by advances in understanding context, natural language, and speech. I will illustrate how new capabilities in email and virtual assistants are driven by advances in both algorithms and user modeling. As we look forward to new types of information systems that anticipate information needs, interact via richer dialogs, and integrate physical and digital information, it is more important than ever to understand and support information seekers using interdisciplinary methods and perspectives.