The Nature Of Relevance In Information Retrieval

The Nature of Relevance in Information Retrieval

Introduction to 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.

Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval

Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval is an introduction to the field of learning to rank, a hot research topic in information retrieval and machine learning. It categorizes the state-of-the-art learning-to-rank algorithms into three approaches from a unified machine learning perspective, describes the loss functions and learning mechanisms in different approaches, reveals their relationships and differences, shows their empirical performances on real IR applications, and discusses their theoretical properties such as generalization ability. As a tutorial, Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval helps people find the answers to the following critical questions: To what respect are learning-to-rank algorithms similar and in which aspects do they differ? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm? Which learning-to-rank algorithm empirically performs the best? Is ranking a new machine learning problem? What are the unique theoretical issues for ranking as compared to classification and regression? Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval is both a guide for beginners who are embarking on research in this area, and a useful reference for established researchers and practitioners