A brief history of ‘vector search’ | Intranet Focus | Intranet strategy & management
Summary
On my desk as I write this blog is a copy of “Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval” by Gerard Salton and Michael McGill published in 1983. Chapter 4 describes the SMART retrieval system developed by Salton with pages 120-127 devoted to an explanation of vector representation and similarity computation. This was developed by Salton and his colleagues in the mid-1960s and represented a significant leap forward in the mathematical modelling of information retrieval processes. The history of the gradual evolution of the VSM IR model is well documented by David Dublin in a paper published in early 2004. Gerard Salton (1927-1995) is regarded as the father of modern information retrieval and over the course of his career (initially at Harvard and then at Cornell) received many awards and honours for his pioneering work.