Table of contents

Information Retrieval for Communication and Computing

A principled undergraduate path from search fundamentals to modern retrieval systems

Read each section in order. Every title can be opened as a TheoryTrace document.

• Cover
• Copyright
• How to read this book
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What Information Retrieval Solves
• Chapter 2: Documents, Queries, and Relevance
• Chapter 3: Text Processing and Representation
• Chapter 4: Indexing and the Inverted Index
• Chapter 5: Boolean Retrieval and Exact Matching
• Chapter 6: Ranked Retrieval and the Vector Space Model
• Chapter 7: Probabilistic Retrieval and BM25
• Chapter 8: Evaluation of Retrieval Systems
• Chapter 9: User Behavior, Interaction, and Search Interfaces
• Chapter 10: Query Expansion and Relevance Feedback
• Chapter 11: Web Search and Link Analysis
• Chapter 12: Retrieval in Communication Systems
• Chapter 13: Multimedia and Cross-Modal Retrieval
• Chapter 14: Machine Learning for Ranking
• Chapter 15: Neural Retrieval and Semantic Search
• Chapter 16: Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Chapter 17: Scalable Retrieval Architecture
• Chapter 18: Privacy, Security, Fairness, and Ethics
• Chapter 19: Building and Testing a Retrieval System
• Chapter 20: Research Frontiers and Professional Practice
• Conclusion