Probabilistic Models in Information Retrieval
- Introduction to probabilistic models.
- http://www.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/bib/docs/Fuhr_92.html

A Case Study in Web Search Using TREC Algorithms
- This study evaluates the performance of a state-of-the-art keyword-based document ranking algorithm (coming out of TREC) on a popular web search task.
- http://www.www10.org/cdrom/papers/317/

Exploring the Similarity Space
- Evaluation of many combinations of term frequency statistics, document frequency statistics and document length normalization. [PDF format]
- http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jz/fulltext/sigirforum98.pdf

Ranking Algorithms
- "Ranking Algorithms" is chapter 14 in the Frakes and Baeza-Yates book. It gives a good discussion of the tradeoffs and choices among different term-weighting strategies.
- http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/iradsbook/irbook.html

Probabilistic Retrieval
- A Chapter in a book which introduces probabilistic retrieval.
- http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Keith/Chapter.6/Ch.6.html

Latent Semantic Indexing: a Probabilistic Analysis
- Formal introduction to latent semantic indexing. [PS format]
- http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/ir.ps

Is This Document Relevant? ...Probably
- A survey of probabilistic models in information retrieval. [PDF format]
- http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~iain/papers/98-csur.pdf

Document Ranking and the Vector-Space Model.
- It describes key issues in document ranking techniques based on the vector­ space model. Several TF*IDF variants are discussed. The cosine measure, recall and precision are introduced. [PS format]
- http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dlee/Papers/ir/ieee-sw-rank.ps.gz

Information Retrieval Tutorial
- Description of boolean retrieval, vector space model, probabilistic retrieval, latent semantic indexing and other IR topics. An introduction to various classical ranking methods is also provided.
- http://isp.imm.dtu.dk/thor/projects/multimedia/textmining/