Applying Bayesian networks to information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) is the identification of documents or other units of information in a collection that are relevant to a particular information need. An information need is a set of questions to which someone would like to find an answer. Here are some examples of IR tasks: finding articles in the New York Times that discuss the Iran-Contra affair; searching the recent postings in a Usenet newsgroup for references to a particular model of personal computer; finding the entries referring to butterflies in an online CD-ROM encyclopedia.