Advanced Topics in Information Retrieval

Information retrieval is the science concerned with the effective and efficient retrieval of documents starting from their semantic content. It is employed to fulfill some information need from a large number of digital documents. Given the ever-growing amount of documents available and the heterogeneous data structures used for storage, information retrieval has recently faced and tackled novel applications.

In this book, Melucci and Baeza-Yates present a wide-spectrum illustration of recent research results in advanced areas related to information retrieval. Readers will find chapters on e.g. aggregated search, digital advertising, digital libraries, discovery of spam and opinions, information retrieval in context, multimedia resource discovery, quantum mechanics applied to information retrieval, scalability challenges in web search engines, and interactive information retrieval evaluation. All chapters are written by well-known researchers, are completely self-contained and comprehensive, and are complemented by an integrated bibliography and subject index.

With this selection, the editors provide the most up-to-date survey of topics usually not addressed in depth in traditional (text)books on information retrieval. The presentation is intended for a wide audience of people interested in information retrieval: undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, lecturers, and industrial researchers.

Massimo Melucci has been an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Information Engineering and Faculty of Statistics of the University of Padua, Italy since 2001. His research interests include information retrieval modeling and contextual search. He is also currently looking at the use of some theoretical instruments of quantum mechanics in information retrieval modeling. He has published more than 60 papers in these fields.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is Vice-President of Yahoo! Research for Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, leading the labs in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile, as well as supervising the newer lab in Haifa, Israel. Until 2005 he was the director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the Engineering School of the University of Chile and ICREA Professor at the Department of Technology of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. He is (co-)author of the best-selling book “Modern Information Retrieval” as well as co-author of the 2nd edition of the “Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures” and of more than 200 other publications. He has been awarded several prestigious prizes, and in 2003 he was the first computer scientist to be elected to the Chilean Academy of Sciences.