This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2004, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany in December 2004. The 33 revised full papers presented together with an introductory overview of the INEX campaign were carefully selected for presentation at the workshop and went through a subsequent round of careful reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on methodology, ad hoc retrieval, ad hoc retrieval and relevance feedback, relevance feedback, ad hoc retrieval and heterogeneous document collections, heterogeneous document collections, natural language processing, and ineractive studies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2005, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in November 2005. The book presents 41 revised full papers, organized in topical sections on methodology, multiple retrieval, ad-hoc retrieval, relevance feedback, natural language queries, and more heterogeneous retrieval, interactive retrieval, document mining, and multimedia retrieval.

Documents usually have a content and a structure. The content refers to the text of the document, whereas the structure refers to how a document is logically organized. An increasingly common way to encode the structure is through the use of a mark-up language. Nowadays, the most widely used mark-up language for representing structure is the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML can be used to provide a focused access to documents, i.e. returning XML elements, such as sections and paragraphs, instead of whole documents in response to a query. Such focused strategies are of particular benefit for information repositories containing long documents, or documents covering a wide variety of topics, where users are directed to the most relevant content within a document. The increased adoption of XML to represent a document structure requires the development of tools to effectively access documents marked-up in XML. This book provides a detailed description of query languages, indexing strategies, ranking algorithms, presentation scenarios developed to access XML documents. Major advances in XML retrival were seen from 2002 as a result of INEX, the Initiative for Evaluation of XML Retrieval. INEX, also described in this book, provided test sets for evaluating XML retrieval effectiveness. Many of the developments and results described in this book were investigated within INEX. Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic XML Concepts / Historical Perspectives / Query Languages / Indexing Strategies / Ranking Strategies / Presentation strategies / Evaluating XML Retrieval Effectiveness / Conclusions

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th annual European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2007, held in Rome, Italy in April 2007. The papers are organized in topical sections on theory and design, efficiency, peer-to-peer networks, result merging, queries, relevance feedback, evaluation, classification and clustering, filtering, topic identification, expert finding, XML IR, Web IR, and multimedia IR.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2006, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2006. The papers are organized in topical sections on methodology and seven additional tracks on ad-hoc, natural language processing, heterogeneous collection, multimedia, interactive, use case, as well as document mining.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th annual European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2009, held in Toulouse, France in April 2009. The 42 revised full papers and 18 revised short papers presented together with the abstracts of 3 invited lectures and 25 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 188 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on retrieval model, collaborative IR / filtering, learning, multimedia - metadata, expert search - advertising, evaluation, opinion detection, web IR, representation, clustering / categorization as well as distributed IR.

In order to be effective for their users, information retrieval (IR) systems should be adapted to the specific needs of particular environments. The huge and growing array of types of information retrieval systems in use today is on display in Understanding Information Retrieval Systems: Management, Types, and Standards, which addresses over 20 types of IR systems. These various system types, in turn, present both technical and management challenges, which are also addressed in this volume. In order to be interoperable in a networked environment, IR systems must be able to use various types of technical standards, a number of which are described in this book—often by their original developers. The book covers the full context of operational IR systems, addressing not only the systems themselves but also human user search behaviors, user-centered design, and management and policy issues. In addition to theory and practice of IR system design, the book covers Web standards and protocols, the Semantic Web, XML information retrieval, Web social mining, search engine optimization, specialized museum and library online access, records compliance and risk management, information storage technology, geographic information systems, and data transmission protocols. Emphasis is given to information systems that operate on relatively unstructured data, such as text, images, and music. The book is organized into four parts: Part I supplies a broad-level introduction to information systems and information retrieval systems Part II examines key management issues and elaborates on the decision process around likely information system solutions Part III illustrates the range of information retrieval systems in use today discussing the technical, operational, and administrative issues for each type Part IV discusses the most important organizational and technical standards needed for successful information retrieval This volume brings together authoritative articles on the different types of information systems and how to manage real-world demands such as digital asset management, network management, digital content licensing, data quality, and information system failures. It explains how to design systems to address human characteristics and considers key policy and ethical issues such as piracy and preservation. Focusing on web–based systems, the chapters in this book provide an excellent starting point for developing and managing your own IR systems.

Theseproceedingscontaintherefereedfulltechnicalpaperspresentedatthe26th Annual European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2004). ECIR is theannualconferenceoftheBritishComputerSociety’sspecialistgroupinInf- mation Retrieval. This year the conference was held at the School of Computing and Technology at the University of Sunderland. ECIR began life as the - nual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research. The colloquium was held in the UK each year until 1998 when the event was held in Grenoble, France. Since then the conference venue has alternated between the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, and the event was renamed the European Conference on Information Retrieval. In recent years, ECIR has continued to grow and has become the major European forum for the discussion of research in the ?eld of Information Retrieval. To mark this metamorphosis from a small informal c- loquium to a major event in the IR research calendar, the BCS-IRSG decided to rename the event to the European Conference on Information Retrieval. ECIR2004received88fullpapersubmissions,fromacrossEuropeandfurther a?eldincludingNorthAmerica,ChinaandAustralia,atestamenttothegrowing popularity and reputation of the conference. Out of the 88 submitted papers, 28 were accepted for presentation. All papers were reviewed by at least three reviewers. Among the accepted papers 11 have a student as the primary author, illustrating that the traditional student focus of the original colloquium is alive today.

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.

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.