Technical Workshop " Information Retrieval (IR)" By: Zahra Taherikhonakdar

Abstract:
Information Retrieval (IR) is finding material (usually documents) of (an untrusted nature (usually text) that satisfies an information need from within a large collection. These days we frequently think first of web search, but there are many other cases: web search, Searching your Laptop, Corporate knowledge bases, Legal information retrieval. An information retrieval process begins when a user or searcher enters a query into the system. Queries are formal statements of information needs, for example, search strings in web search engines. In information retrieval, a query does not uniquely identify a single object in the collection. Instead, several objects may match the query, perhaps with different degrees of relevance.
An object is an entity that is represented by information in a content collection or database. User queries are matched against the database information. However, as opposed to classical SQL queries of a database, in information retrieval, the results returned may or may not match the query, so results are typically ranked. This ranking of results is a key difference between information retrieval searching compared to database searching.[2]

Workshop Outline:
In this workshop, I will introduce the techniques that are used in IR:

Biography:
Zahra is a PhD student at the University of Windsor. My research is in the area of Information Retrieval. Particularly My research is about how to improve query refinement as a technique to make search engines retrieve the most related documents based on the user’s initial query.