The growth in all aspects of research in the last decade has led to a multitude of new publications and an exponential increase in published research. Finding a way through the excellent existing literature and keeping up to date has become a major time-consuming problem. Electronic publishing has given researchers instant access to more articles than ever before. But which articles are the essential ones that should be read to understand and keep abreast with developments of any topic? To address this problem Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval - FnTIR - publishes high-quality survey and tutorial monographs of the field.

Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval publishes survey and tutorial articles on the following topics:®

Applications of IR
Architectures for IR
Collaborative filtering and recommender systems
Cross-lingual and multilingual IR
Distributed IR and federated search
Evaluation issues and test collections for IR
Formal models and language models for IR
IR on mobile platforms
Indexing and retrieval of structured documents
Information categorization and clustering
Information extraction
Information filtering and routing
Metasearch, rank aggregation and data fusion
Natural language processing for IR
Performance issues for IR systems, including algorithms, data structures, optimization techniques, and scalability
Question answering
Summarization of single documents, multiple documents, and corpora
Text mining
Topic detection and tracking
Usability, interactivity, and visualization issues in IR
User modelling and user studies for IR
Web search