Research Challenges in Enterprise Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval is a major component of Knowledge Management systems in every business but most of the research that is being done in IR today focuses on the Web and not on the needs and challenges of businesses. This is primarily due to the availability of data on the Web for academic researchers as well as familiarity with the problems in Web IR since all of us are consumers and can relate to the domain. In contrast, for Enterprise Information Retrieval, the data is not available to most researchers and the challenges and needs are not obvious to people who are not everyday users of such systems. In this talk, I will point out some challenges in this domain, pose open research questions for the Information Retrieval, NLP, Machine Learning & Data Mining communities, and describe the experimental infrastructure that is being set up at Accenture Technology Labs to undertake those challenges. Our experimental test-bed for Enterprise Knowledge Management Research has access to potentially 150,000 users in Accenture and will allow us to collaborate with researchers and solve large-scale Enterprise Information Retrieval problems.