W. Bruce Croft - Böcker

The NSF Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) was formed in the Computer Science Department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1992. Through its efforts in basic research, applied research, and technology transfer, the CIIR has become known internationally as one of the leading research groups in the area of information retrieval. The CIIR focuses on research that results in more effective and efficient access and discovery in large, heterogeneous, distributed text and multimedia databases. The scope of the work that is done in the CIIR is broad and goes significantly beyond traditional areas of information retrieval such as retrieval models, cross-lingual search, and automatic query expansion. The research includes both low-level systems issues such as the design of protocols and architectures for distributed search, as well as more human-centred topics such as user interface design, visualization and data mining with text, and multimedia retrieval. This collection of papers from the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval covers a wide variety of topics in the general area of information retrieval.They represent a snapshot of the state of the art in information retrieval at the turn of the century and at the end of a decade that has seen the advent of the World-Wide Web. The papers provide overviews and in-depth analysis of theory and experimental results. This book can be used as source material for graduate courses in information retrieval, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

This title contains a collection of papers addressing developments in the design of information retrieval systems using language modelling techniques. Language modelling approaches are used in a variety of other language technologies, such as speech recognition and machine translation, and the book shows that applications such as Web search, cross-lingual search, filtering, and summarization can be described in the same formal framework. The book is intended primarily for researchers and advanced graduate students working in the language technologies areas of computer science or information science.

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) was formed in the Computer Science Department ofthe University ofMassachusetts, Amherst in 1992. The core support for the Center came from a National Science Foun- tion State/Industry/University Cooperative Research Center(S/IUCRC) grant, although there had been a sizeable information retrieval (IR) research group for over 10 years prior to that grant. Thebasic goal ofthese Centers is to combine basic research, applied research, and technology transfer. The CIIR has been successful in each of these areas, in that it has produced over 270 research papers, has been involved in many successful government and industry collaborations, and has had a significant role in high-visibility Internet sites and start-ups. As a result of these efforts, the CIIR has become known internationally as one of the leading research groups in the area of information retrieval. The CIIR focuses on research that results in more effective and efficient access and discovery in large, heterogeneous, distributed, text and multimedia databases. The scope of the work that is done in the CIIR is broad and goes significantly beyond “traditional” areas of information retrieval such as retrieval models, cross-lingual search, and automatic query expansion. The research includes both low-level systems issues such as the design of protocols and architectures for distributed search, as well as more human-centered topics such as user interface design, visualization and data mining with text, and multimedia retrieval.

Information retrieval (IR) is becoming an increasingly important area as scientific, business and government organisations take up the notion of "information superhighways" and make available their full text databases for searching. Containing a selection of 35 papers taken from the 17th Annual SIGIR Conference held in Dublin, Ireland in July 1994, the book addresses basic research and provides an evaluation of information retrieval techniques in applications. Topics covered include text categorisation, indexing, user modelling, IR theory and logic, natural language processing, statistical and probabilistic models of information retrieval systems, routing, passage retrieval, and implementation issues.