Introduction

After an introduction to the motivation and background of the topics considered in this book, the present chapter reviews the most important concepts of the scientific areas upon which the rest of the book stands on. This includes Information Retrieval (IR), Pattern Recognition (PR) and Statistical Decision Theory. The chapter includes also a complete account of standard IR metrics, used in this book to assess the performance of the proposed Probabilistic Indexing models and methods. We provide the general equations, as well algorithmic details that are seldom found in the literature. Probabilistic Indexing is closely related with Handwritten Text Recognition, which is also reviewed here, along with a comparison of the most important similarities and differences between both technologies.