Fields in Information Retrieval

Wikipedia defines Information Retrieval (IR) as a science of searching for documents, information within documents and metadata for documents [1]. Web searching is an application of IR.

There are several fields in IR. Some of them are listed as follows:

• IR Theory and Formal Models
• Performance, Scalability, Architectures, Efficiency, Platforms
• Indexing, Query representation, Query reformulation, Structure-based representation, XML
• Metadata, Social tagging
• Evaluation methods and metrics, Experimental design, Test collection
• Interactive IR, User studies, User models, Task-based IR
• User interfaces and visualization
• Web IR (e.g. link analysis, query log analysis, ad targeting)
• Digital libraries
• Enterprise Search, Intranet, Desktop, Adversarial IR
• Distributed IR, peer to peer IR, Mobile IR, Fusion/Combination
• Cross-language retrieval, Multilingual retrieval, Machine translation for IR
• Multimedia IR
• Topic detection and tracking, Routing, Content-based filtering, Collaborative filtering, Agents, Spam filtering
• Question answering, Natural language processing for IR, Summarization, Lexical acquisition
• Text Data Mining
• Text Categorization, Clustering
• Other domain-specific IR (e.g., Genomic IR, legal IR, IR for chemical structures)
• Blog and online-community search

References:

1. Wikipedia