Finding out about. A cognitive perspective on search engine technology and the WWW. With 1 CD-ROM (Q2706802)

Probably any reviewer (or reader) of the textbook has after its reading to solve the simple quality decision problem: he/she will claim that it is an excellent text. To the textbook quality contributes the book contents, the explanation approach and the textbook language. The contents of the work cover all main questions about the discipline Information Retrieval (IR): the information documents specification, the user needs characterization, the meaning relations among documents, the searching procedures, the evaluation of searching results, the formal (mathematical), foundations of the IR and possible future directions in the IR. Or using an advanced IR terminology it could be said that the book is about how to build the searching engines that are able to seek out information representing ``the best'' answer to an users question. Such searching engines employ advanced tools of information technology like the WWW and some tools of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) fields. I believe that the convergence along some lines the IR-systems and the AI-systems is the cardinal message of the textbook for both the students and the teachers.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe explanation of the IR-paradigms is done iteratively as a whole, and the IR-subproblems are further explained in the same way. That is, the first chapter is a wonderful overview and introduction in the IR-world. In the next chapters are then iteratively explained the above mentioned IR-questions. Any IR-question is first informally introduced as a natural IR-need. But that the IR-area requires a deep theoretical and experimental study prove the chapters 5 and 7 shoving that an advanced IR-problems specification should be in the form that allows to employ AI-like mechanisms (knowledge representation, reasoning, expert systems, learning, etc.) and computational linguistics mechanisms (parsing, meaning assignment, text summarization, etc.) to solve these problems.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe language of the textbook makes it readable, understandable, and inspiring. It is strongly recommended for the students (undergraduates and graduates), the teachers, and research workers, too.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEAlso added is a CD-ROM containing a widened hypertext version of the book and the CD contains the full text of C. van Rijsbergens book Information retrieval.