Information retrieval and the philosophy of language

Abstract

This discussion takes the position that information retrieval systems are fundamentally linguistic in nature - in essence, the languages of document representation and searching are dialects of natural language. Because of this, the discipline of the Philosophy of Language should have some bearing on the problems of document representation and search query formulation. The philosophies of Austin, Searle, Grice and Wittgenstein are briefly examined and their relevance to information retrieval theory is discussed. © 1992 The British Computer Society.