Information Retrieval: Resources for beginners

Information Retrieval (IR) can be defined as the activity of obtaining information system resources relevant to an information need from a collection of information resources. Most of the current IR work is centered on search engines (both online and offline). In this post I will try to gather useful sources that helped me to grasp this field from scratch.

Online resources

Websites

• Information Retrieval Resources by the Stanford NLP Group
• Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)

Slides & Presentations

• Modern Information Retrieval slides by Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Software

• Lucene
• Terrier
• Solr
• Elasticsearch

Offline resources

Books

• Baeza-Yates, R., & Ribeiro-Neto, B. D. (2010). Modern Information Retrieval (2nd ed.). Pearson Higher Education.
• Manning, C., Raghavan, P. & Schütze, H. (2008). Introduction to information retrieval. Cambridge University Press.

As a personal suggestion, get both Modern Information Retrieval book and slides in order to get a first insight into the IR field.

This list of sources might get bigger over time. Suggestions of new sources are highly welcome.