Finding Out About A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW

Finding Out About explains how to build useful tools for searching collections of text and other media. In the process it takes a close look at the properties of textual documents that do not become clear until very large collections of them are brought together and shows that the constructions of effective search engines requires knowledge of the statistical and mathematical properties of linguistic phenomena, as well as an appreciation for the cognitive foundation we bring to the task as language users. The unique approach of this book is its even handling of the phenomena of both numbers and words, giving it a wide appeal. The textbook works for undergraduate and graduate classes on information retrieval, library science, and computational linguistics. More exercises are available to instructors. A supporting Web site includes recent additions to the book, as well as links to sites of new topics and methods.

1. Overview; 2. Extracting lexical features; 3. Weighting and matching against indices; 4. Assessing the retrieval; 5. Mathematical foundations; 6. Inference beyond the index; 7. Adaptive information retrieval; 8. Conclusions and future directions.

Introduces the idea of Finding Out About (FOA) as the process of actively seeking relevant information, and many of its facets - creating a good characterisation of what the user seeks, inferring semantic features of content from syntactic clues contained in documents, and evaluating whether search engines are performing well.

Richard K. Belew is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering departments at The University of California, San Diego. He is an associate editor of the journal Evolutionary Computation and co-editor (with Melanie Mitchell) of Adaptive Individuals in Populations (1996).