About IRF

The Information Retrieval Facility (IRF) is a young and dynamically growing research institute founded in 2006.

The institution is managed by leading international experts in the field who ensure the
highest quality in the research supported.

Like no other facility in the world, the IRF provides a powerful supercomputing infrastructure
that is exclusively concerned with semantic processing of text. It has at its heart a huge
collection of documents representing the global archive of ideas and inventions in an
environment, which allows large-scale scientific experiments on ways to manage and
retrieve this knowledge.

This enormous collection of real data allows IR researchers from all over the world to
experiment for the first time on a realistic data corpus. The quality of search results is
reviewed and evaluated in many fields but especially those specialising in patent search.