Paul Clough

Significant amounts of information available today contain references to places on earth. Traditionally such information has been held as structured data and was the concern of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). However, increasing amounts of data in the form of unstructured text are available for indexing and retrieval that also contain spatial references. This monograph describes the field of Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) that seeks to develop spatially-aware search systems and support user's geographical information needs. Important concepts with respect to storing, querying and analysing geographical information in computers are introduced, before user needs and interaction in the context of GIR are explored. The task of associating documents with coordinates, prior to their indexing and ranking forms the core of any GIR system, and different approaches and their implications are discussed. Evaluating the resulting systems and their components, and different paradigms for doing so continue to be an important area of research in GIR and are illustrated through several examples. The monograph provides an overview of the research field, and in so doing identifies key remaining research challenges in GIR.

The land, labor, credit, and trading institutions of Marmara village, in Hausaland, northern Nigeria, are detailed in this study through fieldwork conducted in two national economic cycles - the petroleum-boom prosperity (in 1977-1979), and the macro-economic decline (in 1985, 1996 and 1998). The book unveils a new paradigm of economic change in the West African savannah, demonstrating how rural accumulation in a polygynous society actually limits the extent of inequality while at the same time promoting technical change. A uniquely African non-capitalist trajectory of accumulation subordinates the acquisition of capital to the expansion of polygynous families, clientage networks, and circles of trading friends. The whole trajectory is driven by an indigenous ethics of personal responsibility. This model disputes the validity of both Marxian theories of capitalist transformation in Africa and the New Institutional Economics.

We are living in a multilingual world and the diversity in languages which are used to interact with information access systems has generated a wide variety of challenges to be addressed by computer and information scientists. The growing amount of non-English information accessible globally and the increased worldwide exposure of enterprises also necessitates the adaptation of Information Retrieval (IR) methods to new, multilingual settings.Peters, Braschler and Clough present a comprehensive description of the technologies involved in designing and developing systems for Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR). They provide readers with broad coverage of the various issues involved in creating systems to make accessible digitally stored materials regardless of the language(s) they are written in. Details on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) are also covered that help readers to understand how to develop retrieval systems that cross language boundaries. Their work is divided into six chapters and accompanies the reader step-by-step through the various stages involved in building, using and evaluating MLIR systems. The book concludes with some examples of recent applications that utilise MLIR technologies. Some of the techniques described have recently started to appear in commercial search systems, while others have the potential to be part of future incarnations.The book is intended for graduate students, scholars, and practitioners with a basic understanding of classical text retrieval methods. It offers guidelines and information on all aspects that need to be taken into consideration when building MLIR systems, while avoiding too many ‘hands-on details’ that could rapidly become obsolete. Thus it bridges the gap between the material covered by most of the classical IR textbooks and the novel requirements related to the acquisition and dissemination of information in whatever language it is stored.

We are living in a multilingual world and the diversity in languages which are used to interact with information access systems has generated a wide variety of challenges to be addressed by computer and information scientists. The growing amount of non-English information accessible globally and the increased worldwide exposure of enterprises also necessitates the adaptation of Information Retrieval (IR) methods to new, multilingual settings.Peters, Braschler and Clough present a comprehensive description of the technologies involved in designing and developing systems for Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR). They provide readers with broad coverage of the various issues involved in creating systems to make accessible digitally stored materials regardless of the language(s) they are written in. Details on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) are also covered that help readers to understand how to develop retrieval systems that cross language boundaries. Their work is divided into six chapters and accompanies the reader step-by-step through the various stages involved in building, using and evaluating MLIR systems. The book concludes with some examples of recent applications that utilise MLIR technologies. Some of the techniques described have recently started to appear in commercial search systems, while others have the potential to be part of future incarnations.The book is intended for graduate students, scholars, and practitioners with a basic understanding of classical text retrieval methods. It offers guidelines and information on all aspects that need to be taken into consideration when building MLIR systems, while avoiding too many ‘hands-on details’ that could rapidly become obsolete. Thus it bridges the gap between the material covered by most of the classical IR textbooks and the novel requirements related to the acquisition and dissemination of information in whatever language it is stored.