Information Access Through Search Engines and Digital Libraries With 18 Tables and 39 Figures

The Information Management Systems group at the University of Padua, led by Maristella Agosti, has been a major contributor to information retrieval and digital libraries for nearly twenty years.This group has produced some of Italy’s best-known IR researchers, whose work spans a broad range of topics, as the papers in this book demonstrate.

The Information Management Systems group at the University of Padua, led by Maristella Agosti, has been a major contributor to information retrieval (IR) and digital libraries for nearly twenty years. This group has gained an excellent reputation in the IR community and has produced some of the best-known IR researchers, whose work spans a broad range of topics.

The papers in this book deal with e.g. automated text categorizations, web link analysis algorithms, retrieval in multimedia digital libraries, and multilingual information retrieval. The presentation of original research results built on the past work of the group which at the same time summarizes past findings and opens up new directions and new areas of possible future research and cooperation will appeal to researchers and developers in institutions and companies working on search engines and information retrieval algorithms.

The Information Management Systems group at the University of Padua, led by Maristella Agosti, has been a major contributor to information retrieval and digital libraries for nearly twenty years.This group has produced some of Italy’s best-known IR researchers, whose work spans a broad range of topics, as the papers in this book demonstrate. One of the goalsof the IR book series is to highlight the work of academic research centers in our ?eld, in order to balancetheperceptionthateveryoneinIRworksforasearchenginecompany. One of the best aspects of our ?eld is that, as academic researchers, we can work with new graduate students and collaborate with companies to ensure that our research has direct impact on systems that people use every day. The Padua group is typical in this respect, and has been involved in a series of collaborations and major European projects over the years. I hope this volume inspires graduate students to pursue research in IR, and I encourage other research groups to contribute their own collections of papers. Amherst, Massachusetts. July 2007. W. Bruce Croft Preface The Information Management Systems (IMS) Research Group was formed in the Department of Information Engineering (formerly Department of El- tronicsandComputer Science)ofthe UniversityofPadua,Italy,in1987when the department was established. The group activities are concerned with the design,modelingandimplementationofadvancedinformationretrievaltools– such as search engines – and digital library systems.