Information Retrieval

The meaning of the term information retrieval can be very broad. Just getting a credit card out of your wallet so that you can type in the card number is a form of information retrieval. Information retrieval (IR) is finding material (usually documents) of an unstructured nature (usually text) that satisfies an information need from within large collections (usually stored on computers). The term "unstructured data" refers to data which does not have clear, semantically overt, easy-for-a-computer structure. It is the opposite of structured data, the canonical example of which is a relational database, of the sort companies usually use to maintain product inventories and personnel records. In reality, almost no data are truly "unstructured". The field of information retrieval also covers supporting users in browsing or filtering document collections or further processing a set of retrieved documents. Given a set of documents, clustering is the task of coming up with a good grouping of the documents based on their contents.