The concept of knowledge is deeply human but Information Retrieval and Question Answering represents the basic steps for an artificial approach of knowledge. Information retrieval is finding material, usually documents of an unstructured nature that satisfies an information need from within large collections (usually stored on computers).

The field of information retrieval also covers supporting users in browsing or filtering document collections or further processing a set of retrieved documents. This also couples with natural language processing to understand user questions and presenting the right answer. Information retrieval powered with natural language understanding is fast becoming the dominant form of information access, overtaking traditional database style searching.