Editing Information retrieval (section)

== Timeline ==

* Before the '''1900s'''
*: '''1801''': [[Joseph Marie Jacquard]] invents the [[Jacquard loom]], the first machine to use punched cards to control a sequence of operations.
*: '''1880s''': [[Herman Hollerith]] invents an electro-mechanical data tabulator using punch cards as a machine readable medium.
*: '''1890''' Hollerith [[Punched cards|cards]], [[keypunch]]es and [[Tabulating machine|tabulators]] used to process the [[1890 US census]] data.
* '''1920s–1930s'''
*: [[Emanuel Goldberg]] submits patents for his "Statistical Machine", a document search engine that used photoelectric cells and pattern recognition to search the metadata on rolls of microfilmed documents.
* '''1940s–1950s'''
*: '''late 1940s''': The US military confronted problems of indexing and retrieval of wartime scientific research documents captured from Germans.
*:: '''1945''': [[Vannevar Bush]]'s ''[[As We May Think]]'' appeared in ''[[Atlantic Monthly]]''.
*:: '''1947''': [[Hans Peter Luhn]] (research engineer at IBM since 1941) began work on a mechanized punch card-based system for searching chemical compounds.
*: '''1950s''': Growing concern in the US for a "science gap" with the USSR motivated, encouraged funding and provided a backdrop for mechanized literature searching systems ([[Allen Kent]] ''et al.'') and the invention of the [[citation index]] by [[Eugene Garfield]].
*: '''1950''': The term "information retrieval" was coined by [[Calvin Mooers]].<ref>Mooers, Calvin N.; ''[https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034570591;view=1up;seq=3 The Theory of Digital Handling of Non-numerical Information and its Implications to Machine Economics]'' (Zator Technical Bulletin No. 48), cited in {{cite journal|last1=Fairthorne|first1=R. A.|title=Automatic Retrieval of Recorded Information|journal=The Computer Journal|date=1958|volume=1|issue=1|page=37|doi=10.1093/comjnl/1.1.36|doi-access=free}}</ref>
*: '''1951''': Philip Bagley conducted the earliest experiment in computerized document retrieval in a master thesis at [[MIT]].<ref name="Doyle1975">{{cite book |last1=Doyle |first1=Lauren |last2=Becker |first2=Joseph |title=Information Retrieval and Processing |publisher=Melville |year=1975 |pages=410 pp |isbn=978-0-471-22151-7 }}</ref>
*: '''1955''': Allen Kent joined [[Case Western Reserve University]], and eventually became associate director of the Center for Documentation and Communications Research. That same year, Kent and colleagues published a paper in American Documentation describing the precision and recall measures as well as detailing a proposed "framework" for evaluating an IR system which included statistical sampling methods for determining the number of relevant documents not retrieved.<ref>{{cite journal |title=Machine literature searching X. Machine language; factors underlying its design and development |journal=American Documentation|volume=6|issue=4|pages=242–254|doi=10.1002/asi.5090060411|year=1955|last1=Perry|first1=James W.|last2=Kent|first2=Allen|last3=Berry|first3=Madeline M.}}</ref>
*: '''1958''': International Conference on Scientific Information Washington DC included consideration of IR systems as a solution to problems identified. See: ''Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information, 1958'' (National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, 1959)
*: '''1959''': [[Hans Peter Luhn]] published "Auto-encoding of documents for information retrieval".
* '''1960s''':
*: '''early 1960s''': [[Gerard Salton]] began work on IR at Harvard, later moved to Cornell.
*: '''1960''': [[Melvin Earl Maron]] and John Lary<!-- sic --> Kuhns<ref name="Maron2008">{{cite journal |title=An Historical Note on the Origins of Probabilistic Indexing |last=Maron | first=Melvin E. |journal=Information Processing and Management |volume=44 |year=2008 |pages=971–972 |url=http://yunus.hacettepe.edu.tr/~tonta/courses/spring2008/bby703/maron-on-probabilistic%20indexing-2008.pdf |doi=10.1016/j.ipm.2007.02.012 |issue=2 }}</ref> published "On relevance, probabilistic indexing, and information retrieval" in the Journal of the ACM 7(3):216–244, July 1960.
*: '''1962''':
*:* [[Cyril W. Cleverdon]] published early findings of the Cranfield studies, developing a model for IR system evaluation. See: Cyril W. Cleverdon, "Report on the Testing and Analysis of an Investigation into the Comparative Efficiency of Indexing Systems". Cranfield Collection of Aeronautics, Cranfield, England, 1962.
*:* Kent published ''Information Analysis and Retrieval''.
*: '''1963''':
*:* Weinberg report "Science, Government and Information" gave a full articulation of the idea of a "crisis of scientific information".  The report was named after Dr. [[Alvin Weinberg]].
*:* Joseph Becker and [[Robert M. Hayes (information scientist)|Robert M. Hayes]] published text on information retrieval. Becker, Joseph; Hayes, Robert Mayo. ''Information storage and retrieval: tools, elements, theories''. New York, Wiley (1963).
*: '''1964''':
*:* [[Karen Spärck Jones]] finished her thesis at Cambridge, ''Synonymy and Semantic Classification'', and continued work on [[computational linguistics]] as it applies to IR.
*:* The [[National Bureau of Standards]] sponsored a symposium titled "Statistical Association Methods for Mechanized Documentation". Several highly significant papers, including G. Salton's first published reference (we believe) to the [[SMART Information Retrieval System|SMART]] system.
*:'''mid-1960s''':
*::* National Library of Medicine developed [[MEDLARS]] Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System, the first major machine-readable database and batch-retrieval system.
*::* Project Intrex at MIT.
*:: '''1965''': [[J. C. R. Licklider]] published ''Libraries of the Future''.
*:: '''1966''': [[Don Swanson]] was involved in studies at University of Chicago on Requirements for Future Catalogs.
*: '''late 1960s''': [[F. Wilfrid Lancaster]] completed evaluation studies of the MEDLARS system and published the first edition of his text on information retrieval.
*:: '''1968''':
*:* Gerard Salton published ''Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval''.
*:* John W. Sammon, Jr.'s RADC Tech report "Some Mathematics of Information Storage and Retrieval..." outlined the vector model.
*:: '''1969''': Sammon's "[http://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/pgt/COMP61021/reference/Sammon.pdf A nonlinear mapping for data structure analysis] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170808172524/http://studentnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/pgt/COMP61021/reference/Sammon.pdf |date=2017-08-08 }}" (IEEE Transactions on Computers) was the first proposal for visualization interface to an IR system.
* '''1970s'''
*: '''early 1970s''':
*::* First online systems—NLM's AIM-TWX, MEDLINE; Lockheed's Dialog; SDC's ORBIT.
*::* [[Theodor Nelson]] promoting concept of [[hypertext]], published ''Computer Lib/Dream Machines''.
*: '''1971''': [[Nicholas Jardine]] and [[Cornelis J. van Rijsbergen]] published "The use of [[hierarchic clustering]] in information retrieval", which articulated the "cluster hypothesis".<ref>{{cite journal|author=N. Jardine, C.J. van Rijsbergen|title=The use of hierarchic clustering in information retrieval|journal=Information Storage and Retrieval|volume=7|issue=5|pages=217–240|date=December 1971|doi=10.1016/0020-0271(71)90051-9}}</ref>
*: '''1975''': Three highly influential publications by Salton fully articulated his vector processing framework and [[Term Discrimination|term discrimination]] model:
*::* ''A Theory of Indexing'' (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)
*::* ''A Theory of Term Importance in Automatic Text Analysis'' ([[JASIS]] v. 26)
*::* ''A Vector Space Model for Automatic Indexing'' ([[Communications of the ACM|CACM]] 18:11)
*: '''1978''': The First [[Association for Computing Machinery|ACM]] [[Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval|SIGIR]] conference.
*: '''1979''': C. J. van Rijsbergen published ''Information Retrieval'' (Butterworths). Heavy emphasis on probabilistic models.
*: '''1979''': Tamas Doszkocs implemented the CITE [[natural language user interface]] for MEDLINE at the National Library of Medicine. The CITE system supported free form query input, ranked output and relevance feedback.<ref>Doszkocs, T.E. & Rapp, B.A. (1979). "Searching MEDLINE in English: a Prototype User Interface with Natural Language Query, Ranked Output, and relevance feedback," In: Proceedings of the ASIS Annual Meeting, 16: 131–139.</ref>
* '''1980s'''
*: '''1980''': First international ACM SIGIR conference, joint with British Computer Society IR group in Cambridge.
*: '''1982''': [[Nicholas J. Belkin]], Robert N. Oddy, and Helen M. Brooks proposed the ASK (Anomalous State of Knowledge) viewpoint for information retrieval. This was an important concept, though their automated analysis tool proved ultimately disappointing.
*: '''1983''': Salton (and Michael J. McGill) published ''Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval'' (McGraw-Hill), with heavy emphasis on vector models.
*: '''1985''': David Blair and [[Bill Maron]] publish: An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness for a Full-Text Document-Retrieval System
*: '''mid-1980s''': Efforts to develop end-user versions of commercial IR systems.
*:: '''1985–1993''': Key papers on and experimental systems for visualization interfaces.
*:: Work by [[Donald B. Crouch]], [[Robert R. Korfhage]], Matthew Chalmers, Anselm Spoerri and others.
*: '''1989''': First [[World Wide Web]] proposals by [[Tim Berners-Lee]] at [[CERN]].
* '''1990s'''
*: '''1992''': First [[Text Retrieval Conference|TREC]] conference.
*: '''1997''': Publication of [[Robert R. Korfhage|Korfhage]]'s ''Information Storage and Retrieval''<ref name="Korfhage1997">{{cite book |last=Korfhage |first=Robert R. |title=Information Storage and Retrieval |publisher=Wiley |year=1997 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/informationstora00korf/page/368 368 pp] |isbn=978-0-471-14338-3 |url=https://archive.org/details/informationstora00korf/page/368 |url-access=registration }}</ref> with emphasis on visualization and multi-reference point systems.
*: '''1998:''' [[Google]] is founded by [[Larry Page]] and [[Sergey Brin]]. It introduces the PageRank algorithm, which evaluates the importance of web pages based on hyperlink structure.<ref name=":22">{{Cite web |title=The Anatomy of a Search Engine |url=http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html |access-date=2025-04-09 |website=infolab.stanford.edu}}</ref>
*: '''1999''': Publication of [[Ricardo Baeza-Yates]] and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto's ''Modern Information Retrieval'' by Addison Wesley, the first book that attempts to cover all IR. 
* '''2000s'''
*: '''2001:''' [[Wikipedia]] launches as a free, collaborative online encyclopedia. It quickly becomes a major resource for information retrieval, particularly for natural language processing and semantic search benchmarks.<ref>{{Citation |title=History of Wikipedia |date=2025-02-21 |work=Wikipedia |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia |access-date=2025-04-09 |language=en}}</ref>
*: '''2009:''' Microsoft launches Bing, introducing features such as related searches, semantic suggestions, and later incorporating deep learning techniques into its ranking algorithms.<ref name=":32">{{Cite journal |last1=Uyar |first1=Ahmet |last2=Aliyu |first2=Farouk Musa |date=2015-01-01 |title=Evaluating search features of Google Knowledge Graph and Bing Satori: Entity types, list searches and query interfaces |url=https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/oir-10-2014-0257/full/html |journal=Online Information Review |volume=39 |issue=2 |pages=197–213 |doi=10.1108/OIR-10-2014-0257 |issn=1468-4527}}</ref>
* '''2010s'''
*: '''2013:''' Google’s Hummingbird algorithm goes live, marking a shift from keyword matching toward understanding query intent and [[Semantic Web|semantic context]] in search queries.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Sullivan |first=Danny |date=2013-09-26 |title=FAQ: All About The New Google "Hummingbird" Algorithm |url=https://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816 |access-date=2025-04-09 |website=Search Engine Land |language=en}}</ref>
*: '''2018:''' Google AI researchers release [[BERT (language model)|BERT]] (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), enabling deep bidirectional understanding of language and improving document ranking and query understanding in IR.<ref name=":42">{{cite arXiv | eprint=1810.04805 | last1=Devlin | first1=Jacob | last2=Chang | first2=Ming-Wei | last3=Lee | first3=Kenton | last4=Toutanova | first4=Kristina | title=BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding | date=2018 | class=cs.CL }}</ref> 
*: '''2019:''' Microsoft introduces MS MARCO (Microsoft '''MA'''chine '''R'''eading '''CO'''mprehension), a large-scale dataset designed for training and evaluating machine reading and passage ranking models.<ref name=":52">{{cite arXiv | eprint=1611.09268 | last1=Bajaj | first1=Payal | last2=Campos | first2=Daniel | last3=Craswell | first3=Nick | last4=Deng | first4=Li | last5=Gao | first5=Jianfeng | last6=Liu | first6=Xiaodong | last7=Majumder | first7=Rangan | last8=McNamara | first8=Andrew | last9=Mitra | first9=Bhaskar | last10=Nguyen | first10=Tri | last11=Rosenberg | first11=Mir | last12=Song | first12=Xia | last13=Stoica | first13=Alina | last14=Tiwary | first14=Saurabh | last15=Wang | first15=Tong | title=MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset | date=2016 | class=cs.CL }}</ref>
* '''2020s'''
*: '''2020:''' The '''ColBERT''' (Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT) model, designed for efficient passage retrieval using contextualized embeddings, was introduced at SIGIR 2020.<ref>{{cite arXiv | eprint=2004.12832 | last1=Khattab | first1=Omar | last2=Zaharia | first2=Matei | title=ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT | date=2020 | class=cs.IR }}</ref><ref name=":82">{{Cite book |last1=Khattab |first1=Omar |last2=Zaharia |first2=Matei |chapter=ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT |date=2020-07-25 |title=Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval |chapter-url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3397271.3401075 |series=SIGIR '20 |location=New York, NY, USA |publisher=Association for Computing Machinery |pages=39–48 |doi=10.1145/3397271.3401075 |isbn=978-1-4503-8016-4}}</ref>
*: '''2021:''' [[SPLADE]] is introduced at SIGIR 2021. It’s a sparse neural retrieval model that balances lexical and semantic features using masked language modeling and sparsity regularization.<ref name=":7">{{Cite book |last1=Jones |first1=Rosie |last2=Zamani |first2=Hamed |last3=Schedl |first3=Markus |last4=Chen |first4=Ching-Wei |last5=Reddy |first5=Sravana |last6=Clifton |first6=Ann |last7=Karlgren |first7=Jussi |last8=Hashemi |first8=Helia |last9=Pappu |first9=Aasish |last10=Nazari |first10=Zahra |last11=Yang |first11=Longqi |last12=Semerci |first12=Oguz |last13=Bouchard |first13=Hugues |last14=Carterette |first14=Ben |chapter=Current Challenges and Future Directions in Podcast Information Access |date=2021-07-11 |title=Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval |chapter-url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3404835.3462805 |series=SIGIR '21 |location=New York, NY, USA |publisher=Association for Computing Machinery |pages=1554–1565 |doi=10.1145/3404835.3462805 |arxiv=2106.09227 |isbn=978-1-4503-8037-9}}</ref>
*: '''2022:''' The '''BEIR''' benchmark is released to evaluate zero-shot IR across 18 datasets covering diverse tasks. It standardizes comparisons between dense, sparse, and hybrid IR models.<ref name=":62">{{cite arXiv | eprint=2104.08663 | last1=Thakur | first1=Nandan | last2=Reimers | first2=Nils | last3=Rücklé | first3=Andreas | last4=Srivastava | first4=Abhishek | last5=Gurevych | first5=Iryna | title=BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models | date=2021 | class=cs.IR }}</ref>