Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

Via my homey Kenji’s del.icio.us links (valeu hein!)

Cool online book tip:

Fans of Chris Manning & Hinrich Schütze’s 1999 Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing (like me!) will be pleased to discover that what looks like a companion book is in the works:

Introduction to Information Retrieval

And even cooler, a draft version of the text is available as pdfs at the link.

The layout of the book looks quite the same as FSNLP (which I’ve always thought was nice and readable… what’s the font in the headings, anyway?).

To judge by the table of contents, this text will really fill a gap in the literature, I imagine it will end up being heavily used. Unlike other (nonetheless excellent) standard texts,* this looks to be tuned to IR in the Age of the Intarwebs:

• Chapter 10: XML retrieval
• Chapter 19: Web search basics
• Chapter 20: Web crawling and indexes
• Chapter 21: Link analysis

You can also get a good idea of the content by taking a gander at this course syllabus from last year. Nice slides, too.(Extreme compression sounds pretty hard core, eh?)

If the authors take the same approach as they did with their first book, the PDFs will eventually be taken down once the printed version is available, so lickety split. Scratch that, “the book will remain online after its publication by Cambridge UP in 2007.” Sweet!

* Go Bears. :P