The Challenge of Creative Information Retrieval

Information retrieval (IR) is an effective mechanism for text management that has received widespread adoption in the world at large. But it is not a particularly creative mechanism, in the sense of creating new conceptual structures or reorganizing existing ones to pull in documents that describe, in novel and inventive ways, a user’s information needs. Since language is a dynamic and highly creative medium of expression, the concepts that one seeks will therefore represent a moving target for IR systems. We argue that only by thinking creatively can an IR system effectively retrieve documents that express themselves creatively.