Charting a New Course: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.

• A Retrospective View of Synonymy and Semantic Classification.- On the Early History of Evaluation in IR.- The Emergence of Probabilistic Accounts of Information Retrieval.- Lovins Revisited.- The History of IDF and Its Influences on IR and Other Fields.- Beyond English Text: Multilingual and Multimedia Information Retrieval.- Karen Spärck Jones and Summarization.- Question Answering.- Noun Compounds Revisited.- Lexical Decomposition: For and Against.- The Importance of Focused Evaluations: A Case Study of TREC and DUC.- Mice from a Mountain: Reflections on Current Issues in Evaluation of Written Language Technology.- The Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness in Chemical Database Searching.- Unhappy Bedfellows: The Relationship of AI and IR.

From the reviews of the first edition: "Karen Sparck Jones is one of the major figures of 20th century and early 21st century computing and information processing. ... This book celebrates the life and work of Karen Sparck Jones in her seventieth year. It consists of fifteen new and original chapters written by leading international authorities reviewing the state of the art and her influence in the areas in which Karen Sparck Jones has been active." (Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1067, 2005)