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\item We constantly, naturally Find Out About (FOA) many, many things.
Computer search engines need to support this activity, just as
naturally. \item Language is central to our FOA activities. Our
understanding of prior work in linguistics and the philosophy of
language will inform our search engine development, and the increasing
use of search engines will provide empirical evidence reflecting back to
these same disciplines. \item IR is the field of computer science that
traditionally deals with retrieving free-text documents in response to
queries. This is done by indexing all the documents in a corpus with
keyword descriptors. There are a number of techniques for automatically
recommending keywords, but also a great deal of art. \item Users'
interests must be shaped into queries constructed from these same
keywords. Retrieval is accomplished by matching the query against the
documents' descriptions and returning those that appear closest. \item A
central component of the FOA process is the users' relevance feedback,
assessing how closely the retrieved documents match what they had ``in
mind.'' \item Search engines accomplish a function related to database
systems, but their natural language foundations create fundamental
differences as well. \item In order to know how to shop for a good
search engine, as well as to allow the science of FOA to move forward,
it is important to develop an evaluation methodology by which we can
fairly compare alternatives.
In this overview we've made some
simplifying assumptions and raised more questions than we've answered,
but that is exactly the goal! By now, I hope you have been convinced
that there are many facets to the problem of FOA, ranging from a good
characterization of what the users seek, to what the documents to
methods for inferring semantic clues about each document, to the
problem of evaluating whether our search engines are performing as we've
intended. The rest of this book will consider each of these facets in
greater detail, and others as well. But like all truly great problems,
issues surrounding FOA will remain long after this text is dust.
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