This talk will cover the basics of information retrieval (IR) and its evaluation. It will cover the core ideas behind most IR systems and provide intuition for how they work and what their limitations are. The talk will also discuss cross-language retrieval, in which documents and the user's information need are expressed in different languages.

James Mayfield is a Principal Computer Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where he is supervisor of the Distributed Information Systems section. He is the Principal Investigator for the HAIRCUT information retrieval project, which routinely places among the top systems in the world in international evaluation of cross-language retrieval (TREC, CLEF, NTCIR). Dr. Mayfield has received fellowships from ARDA and NASA, and is the winner of the 1998 Hart Prize for Research at JHU/APL. He is the author of over 75 books, articles and other scholarly communications.