This compilation of original papers on information retrieval presents an overview, covering both general theory and specific methods, of the development and current status of information retrieval systems. Each chapter contains several papers carefully chosen to represent substantive research work that has been carried out in that area, each is preceded by an introductory overview and followed by supported references for further reading.

The scope of this volume will encompass a collection of research papers related to indexing and retrieval of online non-text information. In recent years, the Internet has seen an exponential increase in the number of documents placed online that are not in textual format. These documents appear in a variety of contexts, such as user-generated content sharing websites, social networking websites etc. and formats, including photographs, videos, recorded music, data visualizations etc. The prevalence of these contexts and data formats presents a particularly challenging task to information indexing and retrieval research due to many difficulties, such as assigning suitable semantic metadata, processing and extracting non-textual content automatically, and designing retrieval systems that "speak in the native language" of non-text documents.

"The purpose of this book is to give a thorough introduction to experimental automatic document retrieval. The topics covered broadly correspond to the components of an experimental retrieval system. A substantial amount of space is devoted to describing various formal (sometimes mathematical) models that exist for certain processes and structures in information retrieval. In the treatment of each topic the author starts from first principles and takes the reader through the subject up to developments in current research"--

Interested in how an efficient search engine works? Want to know what algorithms are used to rank resulting documents in response to user requests? The authors answer these and other key information retrieval design and implementation questions. This book is not yet another high level text. Instead, algorithms are thoroughly described, making this book ideally suited for both computer science students and practitioners who work on search-related applications. As stated in the foreword, this book provides a current, broad, and detailed overview of the field and is the only one that does so. Examples are used throughout to illustrate the algorithms. The authors explain how a query is ranked against a document collection using either a single or a combination of retrieval strategies, and how an assortment of utilities are integrated into the query processing scheme to improve these rankings. Methods for building and compressing text indexes, querying and retrieving documents in multiple languages, and using parallel or distributed processing to expedite the search are likewise described. This edition is a major expansion of the one published in 1998. Besides updating the entire book with current techniques, it includes new sections on language models, cross-language information retrieval, peer-to-peer processing, XML search, mediators, and duplicate document detection.

The growth of the Internet and the availability of enormous volumes of data in digital form have necessitated intense interest in techniques to assist the user in locating data of interest. The Internet has over 350 million pages of data and is expected to reach over one billion pages by the year 2000. Buried on the Internet are both valuable nuggets to answer questions as well as a large quantity of information the average person does not care about. The Digital Library effort is also progressing, with the goal of migrating from the traditional book environment to a digital library environment. The challenge to both authors of new publications that will reside on this information domain and developers of systems to locate information is to provide the information and capabilities to sort out the non-relevant items from those desired by the consumer. In effect, as we proceed down this path, it will be the computer that determines what we see versus the human being. The days of going to a library and browsing the new book shelf are being replaced by electronic searching the Internet or the library catalogs. Whatever the search engines return will constrain our knowledge of what information is available. An understanding of Information Retrieval Systems puts this new environment into perspective for both the creator of documents and the consumer trying to locate information.

Test results are included which illustrate the effectiveness of the theory.

Published in 1968 and 1979 as Information Retrieval Systems: Characteristics, Testing, and Evaluation, a textbook for a graduate course in library science. Explores the electronic information retrieval systems that are available and how to use them. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR