Information retrieval (IR) aims at defining systems able to provide a fast and effective content-based access to a large amount of stored information. The aim of an IR system is to estimate the relevance of documents to users' information needs, expressed by means of a query. This is a very difficult and complex task, since it is pervaded with imprecision and uncertainty. Most of the existing IR systems offer a very simple model of IR, which privileges efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. A promising direction to increase the effectiveness of IR is to model the concept of "partially intrinsic" in the IR process and to make the systems adaptive, i.e. able to "learn" the user's concept of relevance. To this aim, the application of soft computing techniques can be of help to obtain greater flexibility in IR systems.

Information retrieval used to mean looking through thousands of strings of texts to find words or symbols that matched a user's query. Today, there are many models that help index and search more effectively so retrieval takes a lot less time. Information retrieval (IR) is often seen as a subfield of computer science and shares some modeling, applications, storage applications and techniques, as do other disciplines like artificial intelligence, database management, and parallel computing. This book introduces the topic of IR and how it differs from other computer science disciplines. A discussion of the history of modern IR is briefly presented, and the notation of IR as used in this book is defined. The complex notation of relevance is discussed. Some applications of IR is noted as well since IR has many practical uses today. Using information retrieval with fuzzy logic to search for software terms can help find software components and ultimately help increase the reuse of software. This is just one practical application of IR that is covered in this book. Some of the classical models of IR is presented as a contrast to extending the Boolean model. This includes a brief mention of the source of weights for the various models. In a typical retrieval environment, answers are either yes or no, i.e., on or off. On the other hand, fuzzy logic can bring in a "degree of" match, vs. a crisp, i.e., strict match. This, too, is looked at and explored in much detail, showing how it can be applied to information retrieval. Fuzzy logic is often times considered a soft computing application and this book explores how IR with fuzzy logic and its membership functions as weights can help indexing, querying, and matching. Since fuzzy set theory and logic is explored in IR systems, the explanation of where the fuzz is ensues. The concept of relevance feedback, including pseudorelevance feedback is explored for the various models of IR. For the extended Boolean model, the use of genetic algorithms for relevance feedback is delved into. The concept of query expansion is explored using rough set theory. Various term relationships is modeled and presented, and the model extended for fuzzy retrieval. An example using the UMLS terms is also presented. The model is also extended for term relationships beyond synonyms. Finally, this book looks at clustering, both crisp and fuzzy, to see how that can improve retrieval performance. An example is presented to illustrate the concepts.

This book presents recent studies on the application of Soft Computing techniques in information access on the World Wide Web. The book is divided in four parts reflecting the areas of research of the presented works such as Document Classification, Semantic Web, Web Information Retrieval and Web Applications. The text demonstrates that Web Information Retrieval is a stimulating area of research where Soft Computing technologies can be applied satisfactorily.

Search engines, with Google at the top, have become the most heavily used online service, with millions of searches performed every day and many remarkable capabilities. Soft Computing for Information Processing and Analysis includes reports from the front of soft computing in the internet industry and imparts knowledge and understanding of the significance of the field's accomplishments, new developments and future directions. This carefully edited book has evolved from presentations made by the participants of a meeting entitled "Fuzzy Logic and the Internet: Enhancing the Power of the Internet", organized by the Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing (BISC), University of California, Berkeley. It addresses the important topics of modern search engines such as fuzzy query, decision analysis and support systems, including articles about topics such as Web Intelligence, World Knowledge and Fuzzy Logic (by Lotfi A. Zadeh), perception based information processing, or web intelligence.

This book presents recent studies on the application of Soft Computing techniques in information access on the World Wide Web. The book is divided in four parts reflecting the areas of research of the presented works such as Document Classification, Semantic Web, Web Information Retrieval and Web Applications. The text demonstrates that Web Information Retrieval is a stimulating area of research where Soft Computing technologies can be applied satisfactorily.

The book entitled "Efficient Information Retrieval Using Soft Computing Techniques" explores the use of Soft Computing technique for designing efficient retrieval system. In past few decades, information collection and storage efforts have become easier but efforts required to retrieve relevant information have become significantly cumbersome, especially in textual databases. Thus designing an efficient Information retrieval system is challenging task and an important area of research. Only users with extensive subject area knowledge and systems knowledge are capable to manoeuvre and explore from these databases. In spite of the work done in the field of Information Retrieval, there is a large scope in this field, in order to improve the efficiency of an IRS. Naturally, research on information models that can effectively rank search results according to document relevance has become a fundamental subject of interest. Thus the Book targets an important area of research.

This book discusses the applications of different soft computing techniques for the web-based systems and services. The respective chapters highlight recent developments in the field of soft computing applications, from web-based information retrieval to online marketing and online healthcare. In each chapter author endeavor to explain the basic ideas behind the proposed applications in an accessible format for readers who may not possess a background in these fields. This carefully edited book covers a wide range of new applications of soft computing techniques in Web recommender systems, Online documents classification, Online documents summarization, Online document clustering, Online market intelligence, Web usage profiling, Web data extraction, Social network extraction, Question answering systems, Online health care, Web knowledge management, Multimedia information retrieval, Navigation guides, User profiles extraction, Web-based distributed information systems, Web security applications, Internet of Things Applications and so on. The book is aimed for researchers and practitioner who are engaged in developing and applying intelligent systems principles for solving real-life problems. Further, it has been structured so that each chapter can be read independently of the others.

This book plays a significant role in improvising human life to a great extent. The new applications of soft computing can be regarded as an emerging field in computer science, automatic control engineering, medicine, biology application, natural environmental engineering, and pattern recognition. Now, the exemplar model for soft computing is human brain. The use of various techniques of soft computing is nowadays successfully implemented in many domestic, commercial, and industrial applications due to the low-cost and very high-performance digital processors and also the decline price of the memory chips. This is the main reason behind the wider expansion of soft computing techniques and its application areas. These computing methods also play a significant role in the design and optimization in diverse engineering disciplines. With the influence and the development of the Internet of things (IoT) concept, the need for using soft computing techniques has become more significant than ever. In general, soft computing methods are closely similar to biological processes than traditional techniques, which are mostly based on formal logical systems, such as sentential logic and predicate logic, or rely heavily on computer-aided numerical analysis. Soft computing techniques are anticipated to complement each other. The aim of these techniques is to accept imprecision, uncertainties, and approximations to get a rapid solution. However, recent advancements in representation soft computing algorithms (fuzzy logic,evolutionary computation, machine learning, and probabilistic reasoning) generate a more intelligent and robust system providing a human interpretable, low-cost, approximate solution. Soft computing-based algorithms have demonstrated great performance to a variety of areas including multimedia retrieval, fault tolerance, system modelling, network architecture, Web semantics, big data analytics, time series, biomedical and health informatics, etc. Soft computing approaches such as genetic programming (GP), support vector machine–firefly algorithm (SVM-FFA), artificial neural network (ANN), and support vector machine–wavelet (SVM–Wavelet) have emerged as powerful computational models. These have also shown significant success in dealing with massive data analysis for large number of applications. All the researchers and practitioners will be highly benefited those who are working in field of computer engineering, medicine, biology application, signal processing, and mechanical engineering. This book is a good collection of state-of-the-art approaches for soft computing-based applications to various engineering fields. It is very beneficial for the new researchers and practitioners working in the field to quickly know the best performing methods. They would be able to compare different approaches and can carry forward their research in the most important area of research which has direct impact on betterment of the human life and health. This book is very useful because there is no book in the market which provides a good collection of state-of-the-art methods of soft computing-based models for multimedia retrieval, fault tolerance, system modelling, network architecture, Web semantics, big data analytics, time series, and biomedical and health informatics.

The growing presence of biologically-inspired processing has caused significant changes in data retrieval. With the ubiquity of these technologies, more effective and streamlined data processing techniques are available. Bio-Inspired Computing for Information Retrieval Applications is a key resource on the latest advances and research regarding current techniques that have evolved from biologically-inspired processes and its application to a variety of problems. Highlighting multidisciplinary studies on data processing, swarm-based clustering, and evolutionary computation, this publication is an ideal reference source for researchers, academics, professionals, students, and practitioners.