INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

There is one required text for this course, and there will be readings assigned for each topic, from this text, and from journal articles, conference proceedings, and other books. Most of the additional readings will be distributed in class (students will be asked to reimburse SCILS for the photocopying charges). It is required that in addition to these readings, students read at least one other, and preferably more, of the standard texts on information retrieval. Some of these are on Graduate Reserve, and one (van Rijsbergen) is available in electronic form in its entirety, free. Copies of books not available in the University Library can usually be borrowed from me.

Hersh, W.R. (1995) Information retrieval: A health care perspective. New York: Springer Verlag. This is a very good general introductory text to all of information retrieval, well written and at an appropriate level for this course. The subtitle refers only to the examples that are used; it is a good text for IR in general.

Sparck Jones, K. & Willett, P. eds. (1997) Readings in Information Retrieval. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. A collection of fundamental research papers in information retrieval, plus very good introductory material to the book as a whole, and to each section, by the editors. A basic resource for understanding information retrieval.

Baeza-Yates, R. & Ribeiro-Neto, B. Modern information retrieval. New York: ACM Press. A useful text which addresses information retrieval from a "computer-science" perspective. More up-to-date, and with more extended coverage of IR topics than Frakes & Baeza-Yates (1992)

Belkin, N.J. & Vickery, A. (1985) Interaction in information systems. London: The British Library. Not a text on IR as a whole, but useful for several of its chapters. Provides a general review of the topic.

Frakes, W.B. & Baeza-Yates, R., eds. (1992) Information retrieval: data structures and algorithms. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. A thorough but very technical book on the topics of the subtitle. Not recommended as a general text on IR, but good for learning how to build systems. The programs are available through the SIGIR homepage.

Gerrie, B. (1983) Online information systems: use and operating characteristics. Arlington, VA: Information Resources Press. A somewhat dated, but conceptually quite good text on traditional commercial IR systems.

Ingwersen, P. (1992) Information retrieval interaction. London: Taylor Graham. A good overview of this topic, with useful chapters on theoretical and experimental approaches to IR.

Korfhage, R. (1998) Information storage and retrieval. New York: Wiley. This book won the ASIS Best Information Science Book Award for 1998. It is a general overview of IR, with a slight computer-science slant.

Lancaster, F.W. (1978) Information retrieval systems: characteristics, testing and evaluation, 2nd ed. New York: Wiley. A very general introduction to the topic, which is best treated as a means of becoming familiar with IR and its terminology (see also Lancaster & Warner, 1993).

Lancaster, F.W. & Warner, A.J. (1993) Information retrieval today. Arlington, VA: Information Resources Press. This is essentially the third edition of Lancaster (1978). It is expanded in several respects, but does not do a very good job on experimental and advanced IR systems. It is somewhat superior to the previous edition because it is more up-to-date.

Meadow, C. (1992) Text information retrieval systems. San Diego: Academic Press. A good text on the topic.

van Rijsbergen, C.J. (1979) Information retrieval, 2nd ed. London: Butterworths. A standard, good text on the topic, somewhat technically and theoretically oriented. Available free at http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Keith/Preface.html

Salton, G. (1989) Automatic text processing: The transformation, analysis and retrieval of information by computer. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Has some useful sections on automatic IR systems, and itegrates IR within an overall text-processing framework. Parts will be valuable at various times in this course, but the focus is rather different.

Salton, G. & McGill, M. (1983) Introduction to modern information retrieval. New York: McGraw-Hill. A very standard text for IR, with special emphasis toward the computer science environment. Somewhat dated in some aspects, and heavily focused on tecnical issues of representation and retrieval techniques.

Sparck Jones, K. ed. (1981) Information retrieval experiment. London: Butterworths. The classic work on this topic. Very good chapters on different aspects of experimentation in IR, by very good people.

There are several sources, primary, secondary and tertiary, with which people concerned with IR should be familiar, and which they should at least look through as they appear. The most important of them are listed below.

ACM Transactions on Information Systems. This is a standard journal for substantial, archival work in IR, with a computer science emphasis. Experiment and research in IR. Quarterly.

CD-ROM and Online Review (formerly Online Review). Best available journal dealing with operational interactive IR systems. At least some of the articles are reviewed.

Information Processing and Management. A standard international journal, with significant work in IR in every issue. Experiment and research in IR. Bi-monthly.

Information Retrieval. A new journal, edited by Paul Kantor and Stephen Robertson, whose stated aims are to publish high quality technical work in IR. The first number is due to appear any day now. Quarterly.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science. A good, standard publication source for information science, with much good work in IR. Experiment and research in IR. About 14 issues/year.

Journal of Documentation. Published by Aslib. Long one the standard and most important journals in IR, which avoids the US bias of JASIS. Experiment and research in IR. Quarterly.

Program. Published by Aslib. Good source for advanced work in operational IR systems

ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 'nn). SIGIR '99, the 22nd in this series, was held in Berkeley in August 1999. This is the standard place for publication of research papers with a computer science orientation toward IR. In recent years, it has been accepting an increasing number of papers on information seeking and on human-computer interaction in IR. Very strictly refereed.

Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science. The quality of the papers in this meeting is highly variable, but it is always worth looking at it. It is just about the only place where person-oriented research in IR is reported.

Digital Libraries `nn. The Nth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries. The first of this series was in 1996. Although the standard of papers is variable, this meeting is developing into the standard source for papers on digital libaries (which often means papers on IR). There is some emphasis on reporting on systems and prototypes, which makes it different from the SIGIR Conferences.

IEEE ADL `nn. IEEE Forum on Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries. This is another conference on digital libraries, but with less high quality papers than in the ACM DL `nn series. More focus on policy and economic issues, and also on database and other technical issues. Some IR content.

National Online Meeting. Most papers in these proceedings are not terribly high-level, but there are always a few of interest. This is probably the best conference to report on new work in operational IR systems.

TREC-n. Proceedings of the nth Text REtrieval Conference. The eighth in this series will be published later this spring. Although not refereed, it has become a standard place for publication of high-quality IR evaluation papers. The most important new results in computer-oriented IR are now first published in this forum. The entire set of proceedings is available on-line, at http://trec.nist.gov/

Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. The standard review source in the field.

Perspectives on...: Journal of the American Society for Information Science. An irregular series of grouped articles on special topics within the Journal. A number of articles on some topic of current interest are put together by a special editor for that topic.

Progress in Documentation: Journal of Documentation. An irregular series of review articles published in this journal. Very high quality.

Trends in ...: Information Processing and Management. A good, irregular series of review articles.

Information Science Abstracts. Good indexing service, with a rather pronounced USA bias.

Library and Information Science Abstracts. Good indexing service, with better international coverage than ISA.

The home page for ACM SIGIR has a great deal of information on it, with links to many other resources in information retrieval.