Information retrieval is a sub-field of computer science that deals with the automated storage and retrieval of documents. Providing the latest information retrieval techniques, this guide discusses Information Retrieval data structures and algorithms, including implementations in C. Aimed at software engineers building systems with book processing components, it provides a descriptive and evaluative explanation of storage and retrieval systems, file structures, term and query operations, document operations and hardware. Contains techniques for handling inverted files, signature files, and file organizations for optical disks. Discusses such operations as lexical analysis and stoplists, stemming algorithms, thesaurus construction, and relevance feedback and other query modification techniques. Provides information on Boolean operations, hashing algorithms, ranking algorithms and clustering algorithms. In addition to being of interest to software engineering professionals, this book will be useful to information science and library science professionals who are interested in text retrieval technology.