Word-Statistical Systems

Abstract

In the last chapter, it was seen that the ability of information retrieval (IR) systems to find relevant documents for the user is far from ideal. Even if one accepts the limitations of recall and precision as evaluation measures, it is clear that new approaches to indexing and retrieval are needed to better steer users to the documents they need. In this and most of the remaining chapters of the book, various research approaches to IR are described. Although the theory and implementation are explained in detail, an underlying perspective of practicality and evaluation of these systems is maintained.