Honestly, I don't think LSI is a good place to start. It'd be better to start a few steps back with basic IR algorithms and data structures like tries, inverte

Honestly, I don't think LSI is a good place to start. It'd be better to start a few steps back with basic IR algorithms and data structures like tries, inverted indexes, stemming, string search algorithms like KMP and Boyer-Moore. When I got started with IR I used Baeza-Yate's "Modern Information Retrieval"; Manning's new "Introduction to Information Retrieval" looks great, though I haven't gotten my hands on a copy yet. Here are the Wikipedia pages on the concepts above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth–Morris–Pratt_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth–Morris–Pratt_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer–Moore_string_search_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer–Moore_string_search_algor...