A student guide to Information Retrieval process

Information retrieval can be described as a process that can be divided into different stages (see figure below). The figure below implies that the stages follow each other during the process, but in reality they are often active simultaneously and may have to be repeated during the same information retrieval process.

What does information retrieval mean?

Information retrieval (IR) is finding material (usually documents) of an unstructured nature (usually text) that satisfies an information need from within large collections (usually stored on computers).

Major components of the information retrieval process?

Components of a traditional information retrieval system experiment include the:

• indexing system – indexing and searching methods and procedures (an indexing system can be human or automated)
• collection of documents – text, image or multimedia documents, or document surrogates (for example bibliographical records)

The aim of information retrieval is to provide the user with the “best possible'' information from a database. The problem of information retrieval is determining what constitutes the best possible information for a given user query