What Should We Teach in Information Retrieval?

Abstract

Modern Information Retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, recommender systems, and conversational agents, are best thought of as interactive systems. And their development is best thought of as a two-stage development process: offline development followed by continued online adaptation and development based on interactions with users. In this opinion paper, we take a closer look at existing IR textbooks and teaching materials, and examine to which degree they cover the offline and online stages of the IR system development process. We notice that current teaching materials in IR focus mostly on search and on the offline development phase. Other scenarios of interacting with information are largely absent from current IR teaching materials, as is the (interactive) online development phase. We identify a list of scenarios and a list of topics that we believe are essential to any modern set of IR teaching materials that claims to fully cover IR system development. In particular, we argue for more attention, in basic IR teaching materials, to scenarios such as recommender systems, and to topics such as query and interaction mining and understanding, online evaluation, and online learning to rank.