An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval

Abstract

Neural models have been employed in many Information Retrieval scenarios, including ad-hoc retrieval, recommender systems, multi-media search, and even conversational systems that generate answers in response to natural language questions. An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval provides a tutorial introduction to neural methods for ranking documents in response to a query, an important IR task. The monograph provides a complete picture of neural information retrieval techniques that culminate in supervised neural learning to rank models including deep neural network architectures that are trained end-to-end for ranking tasks. In reaching this point, the authors cover all the important topics, including the learning to rank framework and an overview of deep neural networks. This monograph provides an accessible, yet comprehensive, overview of the state-of-the-art of Neural Information Retrieval.