La recherche d'information. De la documentation automatique à la recherche d'information en contexte

Information Retrieval (IR) was founded soon after the construction of the first computers and, as such, is certainly the oldest application of computer science to the problem of accessing digitalized documents. About sixty years later and twenty years after the Internet revolution and its billions of pages on the Web IR is even more in the air. The domain was for a long time restricted to non interactive applications where the user had to submit his information needs to expert intermediaries in the so-called « automated documentation » and who were the only ones having access to the retrieval system. Of course the domain is by now entirely aimed towards interactive information retrieval, an approach based on tight collaboration between users and the search engine in environments able to take into account the particular search situations to improve retrieval effectiveness (« information retrieval in context »). This paper presents a history of RI over several decades, the main present research topics and trends, and finally concludes with some of the most probable research evolutions. MOTS-CLÉS : recherche d’information, histoire, perspectives, évolutions.