The IR field has developed successful methods to deal effectively with huge amounts of information, whereas the AI field has developed methods to learn the user's information needs, extract information from text, and represent the semantics of information. All too often, however, both fields have suffered from a lack of integration. Quite simply, each community is often unaware of each others work. Techniques involve application of domain specific linguistic templates which are hard to create. Progress on automatic construction of templates by statistical learning methods.
Ontologies provide specification of concepts in domain.
An essential part of this is defining an ontology. Different retrieval models may be specified using a metalogic layer. Each IR agent has own concept of aboutness. Currently, retrieval involves finding and retrieving human authored texts. IR methods may be applied for AI information management tasks where information demand, rather than supply, is underspecified, and the right response is to be broadly indicative rather that narrowly assertive.