"It is recognized that today's information professionals need to concentrate their efforts on learning the techniques of computerized IR. Information retrieval (IR) has changed considerably in the last years with the expansion of the Web and the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and mass storage devices. As a result, traditional IR textbooks have become quite out-of-date which has led to the introduction of new IR books recently. For thousands of years people have realized the importance of archiving and finding information. With the advent of computers, it became possible to store large amounts of information; and finding useful information from such collections became a necessity. With an increasingly globalized economy, the ability to find information in other languages is becoming a necessity. Since the beginning of written language, humans have been developing ways of quickly indexing and retrieving information. From the first libraries that used alphabetization in ancient Greece to the Dewey decimal system to the Internet the amount and kind of information has grown and evolved. Modern Information Retrieval is intended to brings together state of the art information which shows how current techniques contributes to the process of transferring information from generator to user, covers the issues which must be addressed if they are to work together. This book aims at providing a thorough and updated introduction to the key Information Retrieval (IR) concepts and technologies behind search engines. Information (or document) retrieval (IR) systems deal with the representation, organisation, and accessing of information items, documents or representatives of documents. This book will explore some of the more advanced areas of information retrieval. It will focus on cross-lingual information retrieval, multimedia information retrieval and semantic-based information retrieval. Highlighting a range of topics such as knowledge discovery, semantic web, and information resources management, this book is ideally designed for researchers, developers, managers, strategic planners, and advanced-level students."