Information Retrieval Book Review Homepage

Books Under Review

Data Mining: Next Generation Challenges and Future Directions
Hillol Karguptaet al

Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.

Data mining, or knowledge discovery, has become an indispensable technology for businesses and researchers in many fields. Drawing on work in such areas as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases, and high performance computing, data mining extracts useful information from the large data sets now available to industry and science. This collection surveys the most recent advances in the field and charts directions for future research.

The Geometry of Information Retrieval
Keith van Rijsbergen

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Information retrieval, IR, the science of extracting information from any potential source, can be viewed in a number of ways: logical, probabilistic and vector space models are some of the most important. In this book, the author, one of the leading researchers in the area, shows how these views can be reforged in the same framework used to formulate the general principles of quantum mechanics. All the usual quantum-mechanical notions have their IR-theoretic analogues, and the standard results can be applied to address problems in IR, such as pseudo-relevance feedback, relevance feedback and ostensive retrieval. The relation with quantum computing is also examined. To keep the book self-contained appendices with background material on physics and mathematics are included. Each chapter ends with bibliographic remarks that point to further reading. This is an important, ground-breaking book, with much new material, for all those working in IR, AI and natural language processing.

return to top