Teaching and research in information retrieval in LIS … 5/23...Introduction • Defining the core...

Theo JD Bothma Department of Information Science

theo.bothma@up.ac.za

Teaching and research in information retrieval in

LIS Schools in South Africa

15th Information Studies Annual Conference University of Zululand 3 - 5 September 2014

Overview

• Introduction • Teaching

– Basic – Information literacy – Undergraduate – Postgraduate

• Research – Teaching methodologies – Organisation – Retrieval

• Conclusion

Introduction

• Defining the core topics of Information Science is contentious

• Information retrieval – Embedded within the larger framework of information

seeking and information behaviour • Information organisation

– Representation of information – Organising the information itself

• Information that is not organised cannot be retrieved • One organises information so that it can be retrieved

Teaching perspective

• Retrieval and organisation skills – Basic – Intermediate – Advanced

Basic level

• Part of information literacy – whichever framework or model of information

literacy is accepted

• This should be taught to all students entering university – as a “life skill” that is

• needed during university studies • needed at all levels of life, including the work, business

and leisure environments

Retrieval skills / competencies

• Should include searching the internet at fairly advanced levels – including the use of Boolean operators

• Also understanding the different tools available – Standard and specialised search engines – Searching databases, e-journals and e-journal

collections

Organisation

• Students should understand the principles and use of metadata to organise information – e-journals and databases – standard office documents – multimedia

• Including the role of tagging in social media • Basics of structuring documents

– an introduction to information architecture

Library and information science

• Students at – undergraduate level – at postgraduate level

should be taught a deeper understanding of all the issues of the basic level

• As well as extensions

Undergraduate – Retrieval

• More complex searching with Boolean operators

• Specialised search engines • Advanced search interfaces • How to be an intermediary • How to teach retrieval competencies

Undergraduate – Organisation

• An understanding of different metadata schemas • How to combine different metadata schemas • Taxonomies and ontologies • Document collections • An introduction to the semantic web • Depending on the prospective job environment

– “traditional” cataloguing and classification systems • Designing of an information literacy programme

– to students – to all other patrons of libraries

Advanced level

• Theoretical models of information retrieval should be studied, including – set-theoretic – algebraic – probabilistic – feature-based retrieval models

• Relevance theory

Set-theoretic models

• Documents are presented as sets of words or phrases

• Similarities are usually derived from set-theoretic operations on those sets

• Models – Standard Boolean model – Extended Boolean model – Fuzzy retrieval

Algebraic models

• Documents and queries are presented as vectors, matrices, or tuples

• The similarity of the query vector and document vector is represented as a scalar value – Vector space model – Generalized vector space model – (Enhanced) Topic-based Vector Space Model – Extended Boolean model – Latent semantic indexing

Probabilistic models

• Process of document retrieval is treated as a probabilistic inference

• Similarities are computed as probabilities that a document is relevant for a given query – Binary Independence Model – Probabilistic relevance model – Uncertain inference – Language models – Divergence-from-randomness model – Latent Dirichlet allocation

At a more practical level

• Topics such as – cross-language information retrieval – multi-language information retrieval – principles of image, video and sound retrieval

• An understanding of the technologies underlying both the organisation and retrieval of information

• Teaching higher level information literacy skills to all clients, especially researchers

Research

• How to contextualise the teaching of all of these topics within a South African context

• Teaching methodologies, making provision for different learning and thinking styles and preferences – teaching in a so-called Whole Brain way

• Research on cross-language and multi-language information retrieval and experiments with South African languages

• Inter- and multi-disciplinary research should be encouraged, – e.g. Computer Science and interface design and usability

researchers

Cross-language information retrieval

• Corpus-based • Machine translation • Dictionary-based

CLIR corpus-base

CLIR – dictionary-based

Types of relevance

• Objective relevance which is system-based (algorithmic or system relevance)

• Subjective relevance is user-based and can be further subdivided – Topical relevance or topicality – Cognitive relevance or pertinence – Situational relevance – Socio-cognitive relevance – Affective relevance

Innovation

• Disruptive innovation • The adjacent possible • Liquid networks • Recombinant innovation

Innovation overview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

Conclusion (1) • Changing role of the information specialist

– Technology literate students, researchers and public – Researchers tend to do own searching

• Scaffold teaching • Information organisation and retrieval

competencies are essential in the information and knowledge society – For all aspects of life

Conclusion (2) • How can researchers be supported? • Incremental improvements (adjacent possible) • Work in multi-disciplinary networks (liquid

networks) • Adapt existing technologies and combine ideas

(combinatorial innovation and exaptation) • Browse, read (serendipity) • Experiment (slow hunch) • Don’t be afraid to fail (error) • Expand existing platforms (platforms)

Think critically about the way forward!

Thank you! Questions / comments?

theo.bothma@up.ac.za