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Since the advent
of the World
Wide Web (WWW),
Information
Retrieval (or IR,
of which design
of search
algorithms and
search engines
is a major
topic) has
gained
attention and
popularity. One
major impact of
the WWW is that
users have
fundamentally
changed their
previous
information
seeking expectations
and behavior:
from "going to a
library",
to expecting
"the library
comes to you". A
consequence is
that foreign
language
resources of any
country are
often and
easily available
at one's
desktop. How
does IR handle
the situation?
This talk will
give a brief
history of IR
research
and describe how
IR evolves to
handle some of
the Asian
languages such
as
Chinese/Japanese/Korean
for native
speakers. For
many studies or
activities such
as commerce,
foreign affairs,
science &
technology,
etc.,
westerners' also
need access to
these foreign
resources. To
address this
issue, IR has
developed into
CLIR -
Cross-Lingual IR
- by combining
with
automatic machine
translation
(MT). For
example, users
can input
English queries
to search and
access Chinese
documents
efficiently
and effectively.
IR has been
recognized as an
important
productivity enhancing
tool since the
web became
popular in
society, and
CLIR is also
considered
significant for
bridging the
language
gap between
peoples.
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