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.

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.

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.

Examines Concepts, Functions & Processes of Information Retrieval Systems

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.

Content-based multimedia retrieval is a challenging research field with many unsolved problems. This monograph details concepts and algorithms for robust and efficient information retrieval of two different types of multimedia data: waveform-based music data and human motion data. It first examines several approaches in music information retrieval, in particular general strategies as well as efficient algorithms. The book then introduces a general and unified framework for motion analysis, retrieval, and classification, highlighting the design of suitable features, the notion of similarity used to compare data streams, and data organization.