1. What is IR?
In the 70’s and 80’s, much of the research focused on document retrieval
In 90’s TREC reinforced the view that IR = document retrieval
Document retrieval is important
e.g. Web search!
But researchers work on a range of retrieval-related language technologies:
question answering
cross-lingual retrieval
distributed retrieval
topic detection and tracking
multimedia retrieval
summarization

2. IR and Database Systems
Typically differentiated by unstructured/structured data
What about marked-up text and semi-structured data?
Recent database papers on
nearest-neighbor and similarity search
distributed, peer-to-peer search
Web search
information extraction
text data mining
Boundaries continue to get fuzzier

3. IR and Database Systems
Many proposals for database/IR integration
most recently in XML context, but goes back to the 70s
supporting a probabilistic framework is key
Integration vs. Cooperation
Semantic Web
lessons from the IR world
semantics or statistics?