The technique of data fusion has been used extensively in information retrieval due to the complexity and diversity of tasks involved such as web and social networks, legal, enterprise, and many others. This book presents both a theoretical and empirical approach to data fusion. Several typical data fusion algorithms are discussed, analyzed and evaluated. A reader will find answers to the following questions, among others: What are the key factors that affect the performance of data fusion algorithms significantly? What conditions are favorable to data fusion algorithms? CombSum and CombMNZ, which one is better? and why? What is the rationale of using the linear combination method? How can the best fusion option be found under any given circumstances?

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Information Retrieval Technology Conference, AIRS 2019, held in Hong Kong, China, in November 2019.The 14 full papers presented together with 3 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The scope of the conference covers applications, systems, technologies and theory aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multimedia data.

This book illustrates the benefits of sensor fusion by considering the characteristics of infrared, microwave, and millimeter-wave sensors, including the influence of the atmosphere on their performance. Applications that benefit from this technology include: vehicular traffic management, remote sensing, target classification and tracking- weather forecasting- military and homeland defense. Covering data fusion algorithms in detail, Klein includes a summary of the information required to implement each of the algorithms discussed, and outlines system application scenarios that may limit sensor size but that require high resolution data.

Data Fusion Methodology and Applications explores the data-driven discovery paradigm in science and the need to handle large amounts of diverse data. Drivers of this change include the increased availability and accessibility of hyphenated analytical platforms, imaging techniques, the explosion of omics data, and the development of information technology. As data-driven research deals with an inductive attitude that aims to extract information and build models capable of inferring the underlying phenomena from the data itself, this book explores the challenges and methodologies used to integrate data from multiple sources, analytical platforms, different modalities, and varying timescales. - Presents the first comprehensive textbook on data fusion, focusing on all aspects of data-driven discovery - Includes comprehensible, theoretical chapters written for large and diverse audiences - Provides a wealth of selected application to the topics included

In the last few years the scientific community has realized that obtaining a better understanding of interactions between natural systems and the man-made environment across different scales demands more research efforts in remote sensing. An integrated Earth system observatory that merges surface-based, air-borne, space-borne, and even underground sensors with comprehensive and predictive capabilities indicates promise for revolutionizing the study of global water, energy, and carbon cycles as well as land use and land cover changes. The aim of this book is to present a suite of relevant concepts, tools, and methods of integrated multisensor data fusion and machine learning technologies to promote environmental sustainability. The process of machine learning for intelligent feature extraction consists of regular, deep, and fast learning algorithms. The niche for integrating data fusion and machine learning for remote sensing rests upon the creation of a new scientific architecture in remote sensing science that is designed to support numerical as well as symbolic feature extraction managed by several cognitively oriented machine learning tasks at finer scales. By grouping a suite of satellites with similar nature in platform design, data merging may come to help for cloudy pixel reconstruction over the space domain or concatenation of time series images over the time domain, or even both simultaneously. Organized in 5 parts, from Fundamental Principles of Remote Sensing; Feature Extraction for Remote Sensing; Image and Data Fusion for Remote Sensing; Integrated Data Merging, Data Reconstruction, Data Fusion, and Machine Learning; to Remote Sensing for Environmental Decision Analysis, the book will be a useful reference for graduate students, academic scholars, and working professionals who are involved in the study of Earth systems and the environment for a sustainable future. The new knowledge in this book can be applied successfully in many areas of environmental science and engineering.

Due to the fast growth of the Web and the difficulties in finding desired information, efficient and effective information retrieval systems have become more important than ever, and the search engine has become an essential tool for many people. The ranker, a central component in every search engine, is responsible for the matching between processed queries and indexed documents. Because of its central role, great attention has been paid to the research and development of ranking technologies. In addition, ranking is also pivotal for many other information retrieval applications, such as collaborative filtering, definition ranking, question answering, multimedia retrieval, text summarization, and online advertisement. Leveraging machine learning technologies in the ranking process has led to innovative and more effective ranking models, and eventually to a completely new research area called “learning to rank”. Liu first gives a comprehensive review of the major approaches to learning to rank. For each approach he presents the basic framework, with example algorithms, and he discusses its advantages and disadvantages. He continues with some recent advances in learning to rank that cannot be simply categorized into the three major approaches – these include relational ranking, query-dependent ranking, transfer ranking, and semisupervised ranking. His presentation is completed by several examples that apply these technologies to solve real information retrieval problems, and by theoretical discussions on guarantees for ranking performance. This book is written for researchers and graduate students in both information retrieval and machine learning. They will find here the only comprehensive description of the state of the art in a field that has driven the recent advances in search engine development.

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.

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 refereed proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2005, held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain in March 2005. The 34 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited keynote papers and 17 selected poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 124 papers submitted. The papers are organized in topical sections on peer-to-peer, information retrieval models, text summarization, information retrieval methods, text classification and fusion, user studies and evaluation, multimedia retrieval, and Web information retrieval.

The annual colloquium on information retrieval research provides an opportunity for both new and established researchers to present papers describing work in progress or ?nal results. This colloquium was established by the BCS IRSG(B- tish Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group), and named the Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research. Recently, the location of the colloquium has alternated between the United Kingdom and continental Europe. To re?ect the growing European orientation of the event, the colloquium was renamed “European Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research” from 2001. Since the inception of the colloquium in 1979 the event has been hosted in the city of Glasgow on four separate occasions. However, this was the ?rst time that the organization of the colloquium had been jointly undertaken by three separate computer and information science departments; an indication of the collaborative nature and diversity of IR research within the universities of the West of Scotland. The organizers of ECIR 2002 saw a sharp increase in the number of go- quality submissions in answer to the call for papers over previous years and as such 52 submitted papers were each allocated 3 members of the program committee for double blind review of the manuscripts. A total of 23 papers were eventually selected for oral presentation at the colloquium in Glasgow which gave an acceptance rate of less than 45% and ensured a very high standard of the papers presented.