Our internationally renowned Information Retrieval group has strong expertise in structured document retrieval and business information domains. Members of our group have been at the leading edge of information retrieval research developing specialised search tools for applications including ecommerce, financial service portals, computer crime detection, as well as patient management in medical fields.

Research topics include multimedia, XML, MPEG-7 and Web retrieval, knowledge-based uncertain reasoning, formal models and theories, integration of database and information retrievaltechnologies (probabilistic SQL), personalisation, document clustering and summarisation, evaluation of retrieval systems, information seeking, computational linguistics, and natural language processing. Results from these research investigations are being applied in the context of business search solutions, distance learning, digital libraries, the semantic web, music retrieval, and interactive digital TV.

Since 2002, the group has attracted research funding from the EU, EPSRC, Royal Society, Library and Information Commission, and the British Council. Research projects include: SAVANT on the integration of personalisation include techniques for interactive digital TV domain and a range of user devices such as PDAs, Tablet PCs and TVs; and OntoWeb on developing search facilities based on RDF and XML technologies for the Semantic Web.

The group has strong links with the international Information Retrieval community and with industry in
Europe. Apriorie Ltd is a spinout company that builds on the commercialisation of the HySpirit retrieval
platform. The group is also a founding member of the London Knowledge Management Network and a member of the UK Multimedia Knowledge Management Network.