Information Retrieval - Book Reviews Published

New York, NY: Springer-Verlag New York Inc, 2002.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 6, Issue 2, April 2003

This book follows on from Elayne Coakes'previous book in the CSCW series, The New SocioTech (published April 2000). Whereas that book gave a broad introduction to the re-emerging area of sociotechnical design, this one applies these principles specifically to the area of Knowledge Management (KM). KM has been a key tool in ensuring that people and technology work together to optimum effect within organisations for many years, but recent studies have called for a more systemic approach to the topic. This book examines that problem via sociotechnical principles which have recently re-emerged as one of the most widely used approaches to information systems and organisational design. Including contributions from academics and practitioners, this book looks at key aspects of the field such as: - Knowledge management strategy formulation - Knowledge requirements - Case studies from corporate learning environments and industry It will be of interest to practitioners, researchers, and managers who are involved in any aspect of information systems/sociotechnical design or knowledge management. It will also useful for advanced students on information systems or related courses.

Looking for Information
Donald O. Case

Lexington, KY: Academic Press, 2002.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 6, Issue 2, April 2003

Reviewed by: Dr. Paul Solomon, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Looking for Information presents examples of information seeking and it reviews studies of the information seeking-behavior of both general and specific social and occupational groups: scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists, policy experts, the aged, the poor, and "the public" in general. It also discusses general research on information seeking, including basic research on human communication behavior as found in the literature of psychology, anthropology, sociology and other disciplines.

Principles of Data Mining
David Hand , Heikki Mannila and Padhraic Smyth

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 6, Issue 2, April 2003

Reviewed by: Dr. Scott Sisson, Dept of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus

The growing interest in data mining is motivated by a common problem across disciplines: how does one store, access, model, and ultimately describe and understand very large data sets? Historically, different aspects of data mining have been addressed independently by different disciplines. This is the first truly interdisciplinary text on data mining, blending the contributions of information science, computer science, and statistics.

Spotting and Discovering Terms through Natural Language Processing
Christian Jacquemin

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 6, Issue 2, April 2003

Reviewed by: Dr. Nina Wacholder, School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, Rutgers University

In this book Christian Jacquemin shows how the power of natural language processing (NLP) can be used to advance text indexing and information retrieval (IR). Jacquemin's novel tool is FASTR, a parser that normalizes terms and recognizes term variants. Since there are more meanings in a language than there are words, FASTR uses a metagrammar composed of shallow linguistic transformations that describe the morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variations of words and terms. The acquired parsed terms can then be applied for precise retrieval and assembly of information. The use of a corpus-based unification grammar to define, recognize, and combine term variants from their base forms allows for intelligent information access to, or "linguistic data tuning" of, heterogeneous texts. FASTR can be used to do automatic controlled indexing, to carry out content-based Web searches through conceptually related alternative query formulations, to abstract scientific and technical extracts, and even to translate and collect terms from multilingual material. Jacquemin provides a comprehensive account of the method and implementation of this innovative retrieval technique for text processing.

Finding Out About: A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW
Richard K. Belew

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 5, Issue 2-3, April-July 2002

The World Wide Web is rapidly filling with more text than anyone could have imagined a short time ago. However, the task of determining which data is relevant has become appreciably harder. In this original new work Richard Belew brings a cognitive science perspective to the study of information as a computer science discipline. He introduces the idea of Finding Out About (FOA), the process of actively seeking out information relevant to a topic of interest. Belew describes all facets of FOA, ranging from creating a good characterization of what the user seeks to evaluating the successful performance of search engines. His volume clearly shows how to build many of the tools that are useful for searching collections of text and other media. While computer scientists make up the book's primary audience, Belew skillfully presents technical details in a manner that makes important themes accessible to readers more comfortable with words than equations.

Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics
David A. Grossman and Ophir Frieder

Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 5, Issue 2-3, April-July 2002

Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics is a comprehensive introduction to the study of information retrieval covering both effectiveness and run-time performance. The focus of the presentation is on algorithms and heuristics used to find documents relevant to the user request and to find them fast. Through multiple examples, the most commonly used algorithms and heuristics needed are tackled. To facilitate understanding and applications, introductions to and discussions of computational linguistics, natural language processing, probability theory and library and computer science are provided. While this text focuses on algorithms and not on commercial product per se, the basic strategies used by many commercial products are described. Techniques that can be used to find information on the Web, as well as in other large information collections, are included.

The Text in the Machine: Electronic Texts in the Humanities
Toby Burrows

New York: Haworth Press, Inc., 1999.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 5, Issue 2-3, April-July 2002

The first comprehensive guide to explore the growing field of electronic information, The Text in the Machine: Electronic Texts in the Humanities will help you create and use electronic texts. This book explains the processes involved in developing computerized books on library Web sites, CD-ROMs, or your own Web site. With the information provided by The Text in the Machine, youll be able to successfully transfer written words to a digitized form and increase access to any kind of information

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