Tutorial: Information retrieval

Information retrieval deals with organizing data in a structured form and providing a collection of documents as a response to a query of a user. Boolean model, the simplest model is designed to respect exact matching of the query in retrieving the documents. Vector Space model, a popular model permits approximate matches and also provides the documents in a ranked manner. In this tutorial, it is proposed to introduce the boolean model and the vector space model. The associated data structures and algorithms used in retrieval will be highlighted. There are several research topics in this area which include: compression of the index, using Zipf's law, dimensionality reduction, knowledge-based information retrieval, and topic models. These topics will be discussed.