Document Retrieval: Shallow Data, Deep Theories; Historical Reflections, Potential Directions

This paper reviews the development of statistically-based retrieval. Since the 1950s statistical techniques have clearly demonstrated their practical worth and statistical theories their staying power, for document or text retrieval. In the last decade the TREC programme, and the Web, have offered new retrieval challenges to which these methods have successfully risen. They are now one element in the much wider and very productive spread of statistical methods to all areas of information and language processing, in which innovative approaches to modelling their data and tasks are being applied.