Information retrieval with verbose natural language queries has been generating a lot of interest in recent years. The focus of many novel search applications has shifted from short keyword queries to verbose queries. Examples include question answering systems and dialogue systems, voice search on mobile devices, and entity search engines like Facebook's Graph Search or Google's Knowledge Graph. However, the performance of textbook information retrieval techniques for such verbose queries is not as good as that for their shorter counterparts. Thus, effective handling of verbose queries has become a critical factor for adoption of information retrieval techniques in this new breed of search applications. Over the past decade, the information retrieval community has deeply explored the problem of transforming natural language verbose queries using operations like reduction, weighting, expansion, reformulation and segmentation into more effective structural representations. This is the first monograph to provide a coherent and organized survey on this topic. It puts together the various research pieces of the puzzle, provides a comprehensive and structured overview of diverse proposed methods, and lists several application scenarios where effective verbose query processing can make a significant difference. Information Retrieval with Verbose Queries is a very timely reference on this important topic. It is entirely based on previously published research and publicly available datasets and as such, it should prove useful for both practitioners and academic researchers interested in reproducing the reported results.

Email has been an essential communication medium for many years and the information accumulated in our mailboxes has become valuable for all of our personal and professional activities. As our mailboxes grow, so does the need for the development of new effective approaches to information finding in this repository. For years, researchers have been developing interfaces, models and algorithms to facilitate search, discovery and organization of email data. In this survey, the authors bring together these diverse research directions by providing both a historical background as well as a comprehensive overview of the recent advances in the field. In particular, they lay out all the components needed in the design of a privacy-centric email search engine. They also go beyond search, presenting recent work on intelligent task assistance in email. Finally, they discuss some emerging trends and future directions in email search and discovery research.