Finding Out About
A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW

Explains how to build useful tools for searching collections of text and other media.

Richard K. Belew (Author)

9780521734462, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 July 2008

384 pages, 10 b/w illus. 5 colour illus. 20 tables 60 exercises
23.5 x 17.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.63 kg

'This is a fascinating work - the author describes it as a 'textbook' but it is more than that … refreshingly, Belew's book takes a broader view … than has tended to be the case in most earlier books … the overall structure is particularly well thought out … this is a very welcome addition to the book literature … notable for its concise and very up-to-date summarising of theoretical knowledge, its stimulating cross-disciplinarity, and its challenging and creative use of IT to support is readership. Many students will find it inspirational.' Michael Heine, Journal of Documentation

Finding Out About explains how to build useful tools for searching collections of text and other media. In the process it takes a close look at the properties of textual documents that do not become clear until very large collections of them are brought together and shows that the constructions of effective search engines requires knowledge of the statistical and mathematical properties of linguistic phenomena, as well as an appreciation for the cognitive foundation we bring to the task as language users. The unique approach of this book is its even handling of the phenomena of both numbers and words, giving it a wide appeal. The textbook works for undergraduate and graduate classes on information retrieval, library science, and computational linguistics. More exercises are available to instructors. A supporting Web site includes recent additions to the book, as well as links to sites of new topics and methods.

1. Overview
2. Extracting lexical features
3. Weighting and matching against indices
4. Assessing the retrieval
5. Mathematical foundations
6. Inference beyond the index
7. Adaptive information retrieval
8. Conclusions and future directions.

Subject Areas: Information retrieval [UNH]