An Introduction to Information Retrieval

Information retrieval is a discipline that deals with the representation, storage, organization, and access to information items. The goal of information retrieval is to obtain information that might be useful or relevant to the user: library card cabinets are a “traditional” information retrieval system, and, in some sense, even searching for a visiting card in your pocket to find out a colleague’s contact details might be considered as an information retrieval task. In this chapter we introduce information retrieval as a scientific discipline, providing a formal characterization centered on the notion of relevance. We touch on some of its challenges and classic applications and then dedicate a section to its main evaluation criteria: precision and recall.