Salton Award Lecture - Information retrieval and computer science: an evolving relationship

Following the tradition of these acceptance talks, I will be giving my thoughts on where our field is going. Any discussion of the future of information retrieval (IR) research, however, needs to be placed in the context of its history and relationship to other fields. Although IR has had a very strong relationship with library and information science, its relationship to computer science (CS) and its relative standing as a sub-discipline of CS has been more dynamic. IR is quite an old field, and when a number of CS departments were forming in the 60s, it was not uncommon for a faculty member to be pursuing research related to IR. Early ACM curriculum recommendations for CS contained courses on information retrieval, and encyclopedias described IR and database systems as different aspects of the same field. By the 70s, there were only a few IR researchers in CS departments in the U.S., database systems was a separate (and thriving) field, and many felt that IR had stagnated and was la...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: W. Bruce Croft
• Keywords: CS Departments, Encyclopedias Described Ir, Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2003