Modern Information Retrieval [Paperback]

Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Author), Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1999 | ISBN-10: 020139829X | ISBN-13: 978-0201398298 | Edition: 1st

This is a rigorous and complete textbook for a first course on information retrieval from the computer science (as opposed to a user-centred) perspective. The advent of the Internet and the enormous increase in volume of electronically stored information generally has led to substantial work on IR from the computer science perspective - this book provides an up-to-date student oriented treatment of the subject.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Information retrieval (IR) has changed considerably in recent years with the expansion of the World Wide Web and the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and mass storage devices. As a result., traditional IR textbooks have become quite out of date and this has led to the introduction of new IR books. Nevertheless, we believe that there is still great need for a book that approaches the field in a rigorous and complete way from a computer-science perspective (as opposed to a user-centered perspective). This book is an effort to partially fulfill this gap and should be useful for a first course on information retrieval as well as for a graduate course on the topic.

The book comprises two portions which complement and balance each other. The core portion includes nine chapters authored or co-authored by the designers of the book. The second portion, which is fully integrated with the first, is formed by six state-of-the-art chapters written by leading researchers in their fields. The same notation and glossary are used in all the chapters. Thus, despite the fact that several people have contributed to the text, this book is really much more a textbook than an edited collection of chapters written by separate authors. Furthermore, unlike a collection of chapters, we have carefully designed the contents and organization of the book to present a cohesive view of all the important aspects of modern information retrieval.

From IR models to indexing text, from IR visual tools and interfaces to the Web, from IR. multimedia to digital libraries, the book provides both breadth of coverage and richness of detail. It is our hope that, given the now clear relevance and significance of information retrieval to modern society. the book will contribute to further disseminate the study of the discipline at information science, computer science, and library science departments throughout the world.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Santiago, Chile
Berthier Ribeiro-Neto. Belo Horizonte, Brazil
January, 1999 020139829XP04062001

From the Back Cover

Information Retrieval/Database Management

Modern Information Retrieval

Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto


We live in the information age, where swift access to relevant information in whatever form or medium can dictate the success or failure of businesses or individuals. The timely provision of relevant information with minimal ‘noise' is critical to modern society and this is what information retrieval (IR) is all about. It is a dynamic subject, with current changes driven by the expansion of the World Wide Web, the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and the development of reliable and low-cost mass storage devices. Modern Information Retrieval discusses all these changes in great detail and can be used for a first course on IR as well as graduate courses on the topic.

The organization of the book, which includes a comprehensive glossary, allows the reader to either obtain a broad overview or detailed knowledge of all the key topics in modern IR. The heart of the book is the nine chapters written by Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto, two leading exponents in the field. For those wishing to delve deeper into key areas there are further state-of-the-art chapters on specialized topics, fully integrated and using the same notation and terminology, written by leading researchers:

· Parallel and Distributed IR - algorithms and architectures (Eric Brown)
· User Interfaces and Visualization - the main interface paradigms for query formation and visualization of results (Marti A. Hearst)
· Multimedia IR: Models and Languages - including MULTOS and SQL3 (Elisa Bertino, Barbara Catania and Elena Ferrari)
· Multimedia IR: Indexing and Searching - R-trees and GEMINI and QBIC (Christos Faloutsos)
· Libraries and Bibliographical Systems - online systems and public access catalogs (Edie M. Rasmussen)
· Digital Libraries - the main challenges for effective deployment (Edward A Fox and Ohm Sornil)

In addition, the book contains several chapters on

· Text IR - all the main IR models, query operations, text operations, indexing and searching (three of them co-authored with Gonzalo Navarro or Nivio Ziviani)
· The Web - challenges, measures and models, search engines, directories, query languages, metasearches and trends

Modern Information Retrieval will prove invaluable to students in Computer Science, Information Science and Library Science departments, as well as to programmers and analysts working with products related to the Web, intranets, document database systems and digital libraries.


Visit Addison Wesley Longman on the World Wide Web at:
http://www.awl-he.com/computing/
http://www.awl.com/cseng/

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 513 pages
• Publisher: Addison Wesley; 1st edition (May 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 020139829X
• ISBN-13: 978-0201398298
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #262,578 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent state of the art on information retrieval, June 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Modern Information Retrieval (Paperback)

A very good approach to IR from a computer science perspective. Well organized and easy to read although some chapter could be dry for a novice. Excellent cover of visualization techniques, digital libraries, and web searching from a conceptual point of view. The reference list is large enough (and up-to-date) to keep you busy reading more material for several weeks.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent as a textbook and a practical guide, March 16, 2006

By 

calvinnme - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Modern Information Retrieval (Paperback)

I used this book as a textbook in a course on information storage and retrieval that I took a few years back, and it is still my favorite book on the subject. It explains the concepts clearly yet has all of the necessary mathematical and algorithmic details needed to work with the subject matter.
Chapter one just acts as a guide to the rest of the book. The book is basically divided into four parts: text IR, human-computer interfacing for IR, multimedia IR, and applications of IR. The part on text IR is best for beginners trying to learn the overall subject of IR, and consists of chapters 2 through 9. Chapter 2 is a long and important chapter that introduces fundamental concepts in IR and lays foundations for later chapters. Models for "ranking" documents based on queries are presented, including the boolean, vector, probabilistic, and fuzzy models. Chapter 3 is far less technical than chapter 2 and focuses on evaluation of IR models. Chapter 4 is an introduction to query languages, which are necessary for the elegant presentation of complex queries. Chapter 5 deals with query operations, which is the transformation of queries from simple keywords into weighted sets of terms and also includes user feedback. As in previous chapters, there is quite a bit of mathematics involved. Chapter 6 is devoted to text languages such as HTML and SGML since the user might refer to the structure of a document in his/her query, and that structure must be defined somewhere. Chapter 7 is about operations on documents themselves for the purpose of simplifying them for quick search. Thus, it is important as a time saver to eliminate common words such as "the" and also to reduce words to their grammatical roots. The potentially large size of document collections requires special indexing techniques for efficient retrieval. This is the subject of Chapter 8. Query processing can be further accelerated by using the parallel and distributed IR techniques discussed in Chapter 9, which concludes the book's discussion of text IR.
Chapter 10 is a stand-alone chapter on HCI for IR that discusses the design of user interfaces that assist the user in forming a query and current approaches for visualization of large data sets.
Multimedia IR is discussed in chapters 11 and 12. Models and query languages for office and medical information systems are discussed in Chapter 11. Efficient indexing and searching of multimedia objects is discussed in Chapter 12.
The final three chapters of the book are about the applications of IR. There is a chapter each about searching the web, bibliographic systems, and digital libraries.
The chapter on text languages is starting to show its age, as are the chapters on IR applications at the end of the book. The chapters on algorithms, and particularly the algorithmic portions of the chapters on text IR cause this book to remain a worthwhile read. There is quite a bit of mathematics used in this book, and probability theory in particular. Thus, the reader should already be familiar with probability theory and the basics of pattern recognition to get the most from this book.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stellar presentation of complex material, October 23, 2004

By 

SwingDeveloper "Programmer in the Valley" (Palo Alto, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Modern Information Retrieval (Paperback)

A fantastic, in depth, survey of all the issues surrounding IR, from algorithms to presentation of IR results. With one clear authorial voice, the authors present all the things you hope a survey book will- a structured, coherent and complete framework onto which you can append future learning; what common practice within commercial industry really is; a quantitative analysis of the relative effectiveness of each algorithm, including the methodolgy used to arrive at results; an in-depth and clear explanation of all major algorithms.

They also give fair warning when they are only covering the outline of subject matter (which is rare), and they give extensive footnotes for anyone who needs to go deeper. The writing is always clear; the auithors never engage in the type of handwaving that other authors use to get past material you have the impression they themselves don't fully grasp.

If you need to implement search for a database and don't know where to start or what might be involved, this is the book for you. If you need to implement the GUI for search results and are wondering what the state of the art is and what issues are involved, then this is the book for you. If you need a well-structured framework to help you understand how internet search engines work, then this is the book for you. If you want to press the research forward on any of these topics and you are not already fluent in the literature, then this is the book for you.