Challenges in information retrieval and language modeling: report of a workshop held at the center for intelligent information retrieval, University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 2002
Information retrieval (IR) research has reached a
point where it is appropriate to assess progress and
to define a research agenda for the next five to ten
years. This report summarizes a discussion of IR
research challenges that took place at a recent
workshop.
The attendees of the workshop considered
information retrieval research in a range of areas
chosen to give broad coverage of topic areas that
engage information retrieval researchers. Those
areas are retrieval models, cross-lingual retrieval,
Web search, user modeling, filtering, topic detection
and tracking, classification, summarization, question
answering, metasearch, distributed retrieval,
multimedia retrieval, information extraction, as well
as testbed requirements for future work. The
potential use of language modeling techniques in
these areas was also discussed.
The workshop identified major challenges within
each of those areas. The following are recurring
themes that ran throughout:
• User and context sensitive retrieval
• Multi-lingual and multi-media issues
• Better target tasks
• Improved objective evaluations
• Substantially more labeled data
• Greater variety of data sources
• Improved formal models
Contextual retrieval and global information access
were identified as particularly important long-term
challenges.