Introduction To Modern Information Retrieval

Examines Concepts, Functions & Processes of Information Retrieval Systems

Blends together traditional and electronic-age views of information retrieval, covering the whole spectrum of storage and retrieval. A fully revised and updated edition of successful text covering many new areas including multimedia IR, user interfaces and digital libraries.

An information retrieval (IR) system is designed to analyse, process and store sources of information and retrieve those that match a particular user's requirements. A bewildering range of techniques is now available to the information professional attempting to successfully retrieve information. It is recognized that today's information professionals need to concentrate their efforts on learning the techniques of computerized IR. However, it is this book's contention that it also benefits them to learn the theory, techniques and tools that constitute the traditional approaches to the organization and processing of information. In fact much of this knowledge may still be applicable in the storage and retrieval of electronic information in digital library environments. The fully revised third edition of this highly regarded textbook has been thoroughly updated to incorporate major changes in this rapidly expanding field since the second edition in 2004, and a complete new chapter on citation indexing has been added. Unique in its scope, the book covers the whole spectrum of information storage and retrieval, including: users of IR and IR options; database technology; bibliographic formats; cataloguing and metadata; subject analysis and representation; automatic indexing and file organization; vocabulary control; abstracts and indexing; searching and retrieval; user-centred models of IR and user interfaces; evaluation of IR systems and evaluation experiments; online and CD-ROM IR; multimedia IR; hypertext and mark-up languages; web IR; intelligent IR; natural language processing and its applications in IR; citation analysis and IR; IR in digital libraries; and trends in IR research. Illustrated with many examples and comprehensively referenced for an international audience, this is an indispensable textbook for students of library and information studies. It is also an invaluable aid for information practitioners wishing to brush up on their skills and keep up to date with the latest techniques.

Class-tested and coherent, this textbook teaches classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. It gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using examples and figures, making it perfect for introductory courses in information retrieval for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in computer science. Based on feedback from extensive classroom experience, the book has been carefully structured in order to make teaching more natural and effective. Slides and additional exercises (with solutions for lecturers) are also available through the book's supporting website to help course instructors prepare their lectures.

This is a rigorous and complete textbook for a first course on information retrieval from the computer science perspective. It provides an up-to-date student oriented treatment of information retrieval including extensive coverage of new topics such as web retrieval, web crawling, open source search engines and user interfaces. From parsing to indexing, clustering to classification, retrieval to ranking, and user feedback to retrieval evaluation, all of the most important concepts are carefully introduced and exemplified. The contents and structure of the book have been carefully designed by the two main authors, with individual contributions coming from leading international authorities in the field, including Yoelle Maarek, Senior Director of Yahoo! Research Israel; Dulce Poncele´on IBM Research; and Malcolm Slaney, Yahoo Research USA. This completely reorganized, revised and enlarged second edition of Modern Information Retrieval contains many new chapters and double the number of pages and bibliographic references of the first edition, and a companion website www.mir2ed.org with teaching material. It will prove invaluable to students, professors, researchers, practitioners, and scholars of this fascinating field of information retrieval.

With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications. Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to the most advanced challenges of Web IR. To this end, their book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the principles of IR and provides a systematic and compact description of basic information retrieval techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models as well as natural language search processing) before focusing on its application to the Web. Part two addresses the foundational aspects of Web IR by discussing the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describing link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addressing recommendation and diversification, and finally presenting advertising in search (the main source of revenues for search engines). The third and final part describes advanced aspects of Web search, each chapter providing a self-contained, up-to-date survey on current Web research directions. Topics in this part include meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, and crowd search. The book is ideally suited to courses on information retrieval, as it covers all Web-independent foundational aspects. Its presentation is self-contained and does not require prior background knowledge. It can also be used in the context of classic courses on data management, allowing the instructor to cover both structured and unstructured data in various formats. Its classroom use is facilitated by a set of slides, which can be downloaded from www.search-computing.org.

An introduction to information retrieval, the foundation for modern search engines, that emphasizes implementation and experimentation. Information retrieval is the foundation for modern search engines. This textbook offers an introduction to the core topics underlying modern search technologies, including algorithms, data structures, indexing, retrieval, and evaluation. The emphasis is on implementation and experimentation; each chapter includes exercises and suggestions for student projects. Wumpus—a multiuser open-source information retrieval system developed by one of the authors and available online—provides model implementations and a basis for student work. The modular structure of the book allows instructors to use it in a variety of graduate-level courses, including courses taught from a database systems perspective, traditional information retrieval courses with a focus on IR theory, and courses covering the basics of Web retrieval. In addition to its classroom use, Information Retrieval will be a valuable reference for professionals in computer science, computer engineering, and software engineering.