"In this book Christian Jacquemin shows how the power of natural language processing (NLP) can be used to advance text indexing and information retrieval (IR). Jacquemin's novel tool is FASTR, a parser that normalizes terms and recognizes term variants. Since there are more meanings in a language than there are words, FASTR uses a metagrammar composed of shallow linguistic transformations that describe the morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variations of words and terms. The acquired parsed terms can then be applied for precise retrieval and assembly of information."--BOOK JACKET.