Corpora

We have focused on individual documents, but of course the FOA problem would not interest us except that we are typically faced with a corpus of {millions} of such documents, and interested in finding only a handful of interest. The actual number of documents and their cumulative size will matter a great deal, as some of our IR methods have time or space complexities that make them viable only within certain parameters. To pick a simple example, if you are trying to find a newspaper article (you read it a few days ago) for a friend, exhaustively searching through all the pages is probably quite effective if you know it was in today's paper, but not if you need to search through an entire month's recycling pile! Similarly, a standard utility like the Unix grep command can be a very practical alternative if the corpus is small and the queries simple.

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