Information Retrieval Facility

 

The Information Retrieval Facility (IRF) is an independent, non-profit research institute managed by leading international experts in the field of Information Retrieval (IR).  The IRF aims to promote and facilitate research in Information Retrieval and operates as an open science institution and technology transfer platform.

The IRF has chosen patent data as the basis to build a reference system for information retrieval because of their complexity, volume and strategic importance, as well as the particular needs of patent searchers (high recall). The IRF maintains a semantic supercomputer infrastructure that facilitates large scale IR experiments and provides access to a large and high-quality corpus of scientific and technical data, enabling scientists to study methods beyond limited laboratory conditions. The IRF engages also in industry-relevant, large-scale research projects and provides partners with scientific project management capacities in various research areas like text mining, information visualization, image retrieval and machine translation.

The IRF has launched two evaluation tracks dedicated to Intellectual Property (IP) within the two major international evaluation workshops in the USA and Europe: TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) and CLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum). The CLEF-IP track evaluates IR techniques in the IP domain, while the TREC-CHEM track aims to identify how current IR methods adapt to text containing chemical names and formulae.

The IRF organizes the annual IRF Symposium in Vienna – a forum for industrial end-users, academic researchers and solution providers to exchange ideas on specific problems of professional information retrieval as well as test new technologies.