Language and Representation in Information Retrieval

Information or Document Retrieval is the subject of this book. It is not an introductory book, although it is self-contained in the sense that it is not necessary to have a background in the theory or practice of Information Retrieval in order to understand its arguments. The book presents, as clearly as possible, one particular perspective on Information Retrieval, and attempts to say that certain aspects of the theory or practice of the management of documents are more important than others. The majority of Information Retrieval research has been aimed at the more experimentally tractable small-scale systems, and although much of that work has added greatly to our understanding of Information Retrieval it is becoming increasingly apparent that retrieval systems with large data bases of documents are a fundamentally different genre of systems than small-scale systems. If this is so, which is the thesis of this book, then we must now study large information retrieval systems with the same rigor and intensity that we once studied small-scale systems. Hegel observed that the quantitative growth of any system caused qualitative changes to take place in its structure and processes.