Includes bibliographies and index

This book addresses the problem of analytically computing the performance of retrieval and filtering systems. The text describes means by which retrieval may be studied analytically, allowing for description of current performance, the prediction of future performance, and to understand why systems perform as they do. The focus is on retrieving and filtering natural language text, and retrieval performance for the simple case of queries with a single term, more complex cases with multiple terms, both with term independence and term dependence, and for the use of grammatical information to improve performance. Unambiguous statements of the conditions under which one method or system will be more effective than another are developed