The RIAO 94 Conference provided a strong collection of presentations giving an excellent panorama of the best in current IR R&D. This review briefly summarizes most of those presentations as a basis for characterizing the current state of research and development in information retrieval. The theme of this characterization is that a great number of exciting developments are bubbling just below (and even into) the operational system status but that these developments could be accelerated by an attention to a number of verities. For example, there are multiple paradigms for improving current operational systems and these need to be carefully evaluated through objective scientific experimentation and analysis so that the best techniques from each can be properly integrated into new, improved systems which will go beyond any one paradigm. Not only must current researchers be aware of competing new paradigms but they need to be aware of the work of past generations in Information Science. In particular, the standard structured, contextual, interactive Boolean techniques of modern retrieval systems do work well under intelligent human control and new attempts to add intelligent computer techniques and aides to this paradigm possibly serve as a better basis for optimized information retrieval than the competing paradigms based on statistics, advanced linguistics, or thesaural/classification development and browsing.
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/the-riao-94-conference-and-the-status-of-information-retrieval-a-HSvhS04H0P