Finding Out About

Richard K. Belew is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering departments at The University of California, San Diego. He is an associate editor of the journal Evolutionary Computation and co-editor (with Melanie Mitchell) of Adaptive Individuals in Populations (1996).

• 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.

'One of the wonderful things about this textbook is that it considers information retrieval in the context of the Web … It is only in the last ten years that a new technology- the World Wide Web - has started to have an impact on people's information-seeking activities. It is not easy to introduce current technology meaningfully and successfully into scientific discussions about IR, but Rik Belew has done just that. Students will come to this book with quite a sophisticated knowledge of the Web and will not be disappointed. From the point of view of a teacher introducing the Web as a vehicle for experimentation, it is ideal.' Keith van Rijsbergen, from the Foreword