Information Retrieval

• Another application is information retrieval.
• Legitamitely this can be considered a different field from NLP, but they are certainly closely related.
• Google does information retrieval.
• You want some information (a web page) and the engine gets it for you.
• Google works largely with key word searching.
• There is scope for more language processing.
• This can reduce false positives.
• It can also find things (via e.g. synonymy) that key word search misses.
• There are also interactive queries.
• This is still an open area of research, and of course, industrially viable.