Modern Information Retrieval (Paperback)

~ Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Author), Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (Author)
Key Phrases: document term nodes, structured text retrieval models, query syntax tree, World Wide Web, Definition Let, Historical Abstracts (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Discusses the changes in modern information retrieval and the provision of relevant information with minimal noise. Softcover. DLC: Information storage and retrieval systems.

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 As a result., traditional IR textbooks have become quite out of date and this has led to the introduction of new IR books.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

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Product Details

• Paperback: 544 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.com Sales Rank: #503,040 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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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

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 "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

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

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.