On the implementation of some models of document retrieval

• Authors: W. Bruce Croft
• Venue: SIGIR '79 Proceedings of the 2nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Information storage and retrieval: information implications into the eighties
• Year: 1979

Recently several models of the search process in a document retrieval system have been proposed and retrieval experiments have shown that they will improve system performance. These include models which use relevance judgements to rank documents in order of probability of relevance and models of retrieval from clusters of documents. In this paper various models are compared in terms of the ease with which they could be implemented. An important consideration is how this implementation would be affected by the introduction of new hardware such as content-addressable memories. The main conclusion is that models which concentrate on improving the effectiveness of the search process are not rendered redundant by the availability of new hardware. However, the efficiency of their implementation would be improved.