Information retrieval/History

Introduction

On your local hard disk you can search for files in real time (even it will take long). Search engine for the web cannot search in real time because otherwise the response until the search result appears will take much too long. A search index is an approach to overcome the these times constraints. Instead of searching the web search engine search in data structures stored in a database.

Learning Activities

• Explore the following timeline and identify the needs that are covered by the technical and scientific innovation!
• Estimate the size in MB, GB, TB, PB, ... of the domains that are handled with the technology for information retrieval at that time.
• In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee made the first proposals for the World Wide Web at CERN. What are the challenges and requirements, that appear after the World Wide Web was created and increased in size.

History

“ there is ... a machine called the Univac ... whereby letters and figures are coded as a pattern of magnetic spots on a long steel tape. By this means the text of a document, preceded by its subject code symbol, can be recorded ... the machine ... automatically selects and types out those references which have been coded in any desired way at a rate of 120 words a minute ”

The idea of using computers to search for relevant pieces of information was popularized in the article As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It would appear that Bush was inspired by patents for a 'statistical machine' – filed by Emanuel Goldberg in the 1920s and 1930s – that searched for documents stored on film. The first description of a computer searching for information was described by Holmstrom in 1948, detailing an early mention of the Univac computer. Automated information retrieval systems were introduced in the 1950s: one even featured in the 1957 romantic comedy, Desk Set. In the 1960s, the first large information retrieval research group was formed by Gerard Salton at Cornell. By the 1970s several different retrieval techniques had been shown to perform well on small text corpora such as the Cranfield collection (several thousand documents). Large-scale retrieval systems, such as the Lockheed Dialog system, came into use early in the 1970s.

In 1992, the US Department of Defense along with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cosponsored the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) as part of the TIPSTER text program. The aim of this was to look into the information retrieval community by supplying the infrastructure that was needed for evaluation of text retrieval methodologies on a very large text collection. This catalyzed research on methods that scale to huge corpora. The introduction of web search engines has boosted the need for very large scale retrieval systems even further.

Timeline

• Before the 1900s

  1801: Joseph Marie Jacquard invents the Jacquard loom, the first machine to use punched cards to control a sequence of operations.

  1880s: Herman Hollerith invents an electro-mechanical data tabulator using punch cards as a machine readable medium.

  1890 Hollerith cards, keypunches and tabulators used to process the 1890 US Census data.

• 1920s-1930s

  Emanuel Goldberg submits patents for his "Statistical Machine", a document search engine that used photoelectric cells and pattern recognition to search the metadata on rolls of microfilmed documents.

• 1940s–1950s

  late 1940s: The US military confronted problems of indexing and retrieval of wartime scientific research documents captured from Germans.

  1945: Vannevar Bush's As We May Think appeared in Atlantic Monthly.

  1947: Hans Peter Luhn (research engineer at IBM since 1941) began work on a mechanized punch card-based system for searching chemical compounds.

  1950s: Growing concern in the US for a "science gap" with the USSR motivated, encouraged funding and provided a backdrop for mechanized literature searching systems (Allen Kent et al.) and the invention of the citation index by Eugene Garfield.

  1950: The term "information retrieval" was coined by Calvin Mooers.

  1951: Philip Bagley conducted the earliest experiment in computerized document retrieval in a master thesis at MIT.

  1955: Allen Kent joined Case Western Reserve University, and eventually became associate director of the Center for Documentation and Communications Research. That same year, Kent and colleagues published a paper in American Documentation describing the precision and recall measures as well as detailing a proposed "framework" for evaluating an IR system which included statistical sampling methods for determining the number of relevant documents not retrieved.

  1958: International Conference on Scientific Information Washington DC included consideration of IR systems as a solution to problems identified. See: Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information, 1958 (National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, 1959)

  1959: Hans Peter Luhn published "Auto-encoding of documents for information retrieval".

• 1960s:

  early 1960s: Gerard Salton began work on IR at Harvard, later moved to Cornell.

  1960: Melvin Earl Maron and John Lary Kuhns published "On relevance, probabilistic indexing, and information retrieval" in the Journal of the ACM 7(3):216–244, July 1960.

  1962:

  • Cyril W. Cleverdon published early findings of the Cranfield studies, developing a model for IR system evaluation. See: Cyril W. Cleverdon, "Report on the Testing and Analysis of an Investigation into the Comparative Efficiency of Indexing Systems". Cranfield Collection of Aeronautics, Cranfield, England, 1962.
  • Kent published Information Analysis and Retrieval.

  1963:

  • Weinberg report "Science, Government and Information" gave a full articulation of the idea of a "crisis of scientific information". The report was named after Dr. Alvin Weinberg.
  • Joseph Becker and Robert M. Hayes published text on information retrieval. Becker, Joseph; Hayes, Robert Mayo. Information storage and retrieval: tools, elements, theories. New York, Wiley (1963).

  1964:

  • Karen Spärck Jones finished her thesis at Cambridge, Synonymy and Semantic Classification, and continued work on computational linguistics as it applies to IR.
  • The National Bureau of Standards sponsored a symposium titled "Statistical Association Methods for Mechanized Documentation". Several highly significant papers, including G. Salton's first published reference (we believe) to the SMART system.

  mid-1960s:

  • National Library of Medicine developed MEDLARS Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System, the first major machine-readable database and batch-retrieval system.
  • Project Intrex at MIT.

  1965: J. C. R. Licklider published Libraries of the Future.

  1966: Don Swanson was involved in studies at University of Chicago on Requirements for Future Catalogs.

  late 1960s: F. Wilfrid Lancaster completed evaluation studies of the MEDLARS system and published the first edition of his text on information retrieval.

  1968:

  • Gerard Salton published Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval.
  • John W. Sammon, Jr.'s RADC Tech report "Some Mathematics of Information Storage and Retrieval..." outlined the vector model.

  1969: Sammon's "A nonlinear mapping for data structure analysis Archived 2017-08-08 at the Wayback Machine" (IEEE Transactions on Computers) was the first proposal for visualization interface to an IR system.

• 1970s

  early 1970s:

  • First online systems—NLM's AIM-TWX, MEDLINE; Lockheed's Dialog; SDC's ORBIT.
  • Theodor Nelson promoting concept of hypertext, published Computer Lib/Dream Machines.

  1971: Nicholas Jardine and Cornelis J. van Rijsbergen published "The use of hierarchic clustering in information retrieval", which articulated the "cluster hypothesis".

  1975: Three highly influential publications by Salton fully articulated his vector processing framework and term discrimination model:

  • A Theory of Indexing (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)
  • A Theory of Term Importance in Automatic Text Analysis (JASIS v. 26)
  • A Vector Space Model for Automatic Indexing (CACM 18:11)

  1978: The First ACM SIGIR conference.

  1979: C. J. van Rijsbergen published Information Retrieval (Butterworths). Heavy emphasis on probabilistic models.

  1979: Tamas Doszkocs implemented the CITE natural language user interface for MEDLINE at the National Library of Medicine. The CITE system supported free form query input, ranked output and relevance feedback.

• 1980s

  1980: First international ACM SIGIR conference, joint with British Computer Society IR group in Cambridge.

  1982: Nicholas J. Belkin, Robert N. Oddy, and Helen M. Brooks proposed the ASK (Anomalous State of Knowledge) viewpoint for information retrieval. This was an important concept, though their automated analysis tool proved ultimately disappointing.

  1983: Salton (and Michael J. McGill) published Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval (McGraw-Hill), with heavy emphasis on vector models.

  1985: David Blair and Bill Maron publish: An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness for a Full-Text Document-Retrieval System

  mid-1980s: Efforts to develop end-user versions of commercial IR systems.

  1985–1993: Key papers on and experimental systems for visualization interfaces.

  Work by Donald B. Crouch, Robert R. Korfhage, Matthew Chalmers, Anselm Spoerri and others.

  1989: First World Wide Web proposals by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

• 1990s

  1992: First TREC conference.

  1997: Publication of Korfhage's Information Storage and Retrieval with emphasis on visualization and multi-reference point systems.

  1999: Publication of Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto's Modern Information Retrieval by Addison Wesley, the first book that attempts to cover all IR.

  late 1990s: Web search engines implementation of many features formerly found only in experimental IR systems. Search engines become the most common and maybe best instantiation of IR models.