Simple, proven approaches to text retrieval

This technical note describes straightforward techniques for document indexing and retrieval that have been solidly established through extensive testing and are easy to apply. They are useful for many different types of text material, are viable for very large files, and have the advantage that they do not require special skills or training for searching, but are easy for end users. The document and text retrieval methods described here have a sound theoretical basis, are well established by extensive testing, and the ideas involved are now implemented in some commercial retrieval systems. Testing in the last few years has, in particular, shown that the methods presented here work very well with full texts, not only title and abstracts, and with large files of texts containing three quarters of a million documents. These tests, the TREC Tests (see Harman 1993 – 1997; IP&M 1995), have been rigorous comparative evaluations involving many different approaches to information retrieval.