Contact Person: Charles Clarke, claclark@plg.uwaterloo.ca
| Group Members: | Charles Clarke, Gordon Cormack, Chrysanne DiMarco, Ian Munro, M. Tamer Özsu, Pascal Poupart, Frank Tompa, Olga Vechtomova (Management Engineering), Mark Smucker (Management Engineering) |
Broadly, information retrieval (IR) is concerned with representing, searching and manipulating large collections of text and other human-language data. Research problems falling under its domain include document classification, clustering, filtering, ranking, information extraction, summarization, question answering, text analysis, information navigation, transformation, indexing and compression. Web search services, such as Google and Bing provide a well known example of IR systems. Other area of application include desktop search, digital libraries, spam filters, and recommendation systems.
The research activities of the IR group are generally driven by concrete problems, and validated through implementation and experimentation. Successful IR research often integrates elements of databases, natural language processing, machine learning, information science, linguistics, algorithms and data structures. The background experience and other affiliations of the faculty members reflect this diversity. Many of the faculty are also associated with other research groups within the School, particularly the programming language, database, and artificial intelligence groups. A critical component of the group's success has been close cooperation with business, government, and community users, who often serve as research partners.
Research in the areas of information retrieval and text management has been active at Waterloo for many years. An early contribution to the area was Waterloo Script, a typesetting program extensively used in mainframe environments since the 1980s. A later focus for the research was the University of Waterloo Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary and Text Research, established in 1985 to address the requirements of computerizing the Oxford English Dictionary. Starting in the mid-1990s, the MultiText Project focused on search and retrieval software for extremely large text repositories, leading to success at the annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) evaluations conducted by the US National Institute for Standards and Technology.
Representative activities in the IR Group include:
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel: 519-888-4567 x33293
Fax: 519-885-1208
Contact | Feedback: cs-webmaster@cs.uwaterloo.ca | David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science | Faculty of Mathematics
Last modified: Monday, 08-Aug-2011 15:59:46 EDT
