Introduction to Information Retrieval

Class-tested and up-to-date textbook for introductory courses on information retrieval.

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.

1. Information retrieval using the Boolean model; 2. The dictionary and postings lists; 3. Tolerant retrieval; 4. Index construction; 5. Index compression; 6. Scoring and term weighting; 7. Vector space retrieval; 8. Evaluation in information retrieval; 9. Relevance feedback and query expansion; 10. XML retrieval; 11. Probabilistic information retrieval; 12. Language models for information retrieval; 13. Text classification and Naive Bayes; 14. Vector space classification; 15. Support vector machines and kernel functions; 16. Flat clustering; 17. Hierarchical clustering; 18. Dimensionality reduction and latent semantic indexing; 19. Web search basics; 20. Web crawling and indexes; 21. Link analysis.

Class-tested and coherent, this textbook teaches information retrieval, including web search, text classification, and text clustering from basic concepts. Ideas are explained using examples and figures, making it perfect for introductory courses in information retrieval for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Slides and additional exercises are available for lecturers.

Christopher Manning is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at Stanford University. His research concentrates on probabilistic models of language and statistical natural language processing, information extraction, text understanding and text mining.
Dr Prabhakar Raghavan is Head of Yahoo! Research and a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.
Dr Hinrich Schütze resides as Chair of Theoretical Computational Linguistics at the Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart.