Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Fall 2022

This course offers an introduction to the principles and concepts in information retrieval (IR), which is fundamental to modern Web search engines.
In addition to Web search, other applications of information retrieval systems will also be described.
This year, the course is offered at graduate-level as well as the International Graduate Program in College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). It's taught in English.

Course Information

Instructor: Jenq-Haur Wang
E-mail: mailbox at the domain of NTUT, and my username is jhwang
Office: R1534, Technology Building (ext. 4238)
Office Hours: Tue. and Fri. 9:10-12:00am
Class Hours: Wed. 9:10am-12:00pm, R402, Pioneer International R&D Building
TA: Mr. Yang (R1424, Technology Building)
Prerequisite: data structures (and algorithms), linear algebra and probability theory, working experience of high-level programming languages
Textbook: Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schuetze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press. 2008.
References:
- Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, and Trevor Strohman, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice, Addison-Wesley, 2010
- Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval: The Concepts and Technology behind Search, Addison-Wesley, 2011.
  - This is the second edition of their book Modern Information Retrieval in 1999.
- Stefan Buettcher, Charles L.A. Clarke, and Gordon V. Cormack, Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines, MIT Press, 2010.

Latest News

Sep. 14, 2022: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Fall 2022) has been setup.

(Tentative) Schedule

The slides can be downloaded at iSchool platform in NTUT.
Note: IIR - Introduction to Information Retrieval, MIR - Modern Information Retrieval, Salton - Automatic Text Processing

Week	Date	Content	Reading	Note
1	Sep. 14, 2022	Course Overview
2	Sep. 21, 2022	Chap. 1, Boolean retrieval Chap. 2, The term vocabulary and postings lists	IIR Ch.1, MIR Ch.1, MIR 8.1-8.2, Salton 8.1-8.3 IIR Ch.2, MIR 8.2, 7.1.-7.2, Salton 8.6
3	Sep. 28, 2022	Chap. 3, Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval	IIR Ch.3, MIR 4.2, Salton Ch.9	HW#1 Team Members Registration
4	Oct. 5, 2022	Chap. 4, Index construction	IIR Ch.4, MIR Ch.8
5	Oct. 12, 2022	Chap. 5, Index compression Chap. 6, Scoring, term weighting, and the vector space model	IIR 5.1, MIR 6.1-6.3 IIR Ch.6, MIR 2.5	Due: Team Member Registration Due: HW#1 Sec. 5.2-5.3 will be skimmed.
6	Oct. 19, 2022	Chap. 7, Computing scores in a complete search system	IIR Ch,7, MIR 2.5	Term Project Proposal HW#2
7	Oct. 26, 2022	Chap. 8, Evaluation in information retreival	IIR Ch.8, MIR Ch.3
8	Nov. 2, 2022	Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion	IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5 IIR Ch.11	Due: HW#2
9	Nov. 9, 2022	(Midterm Exam)
10	Nov. 16, 2022	Chap.11, Probabilistic Information Retrieval Chap.12, Language Model Introduction to Language Model Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes	IIR Ch.13	Due: Proposal Note: Ch.11 & 12 will be briefly skimmed. Only selected topics in Ch.13 will be covered.
11	Nov. 23, 2022	Chap. 14, Vector space classification	IIR 14.1-14.3	Note: Only selected topics in Ch.14, will be covered.
12	Nov. 30, 2022	Sec. 15.1 Support vector machines Chap. 16, Flat clustering & Chap. 17, Hierarchical clustering (Chap.18, Matrix decomposition & latent semantic indexing)	IIR Sec.15.1 IIR Ch.16-17, MIR 5.3	Note: Only selected topics in Sec.15-1, Ch.16 & Ch. 17 will be covered. Note: Ch. 18 will be briefly skimmed.
13	Dec. 7, 2022	Introduction to Word Embeddings Chap. 19, Web search basics	IIR Ch.19, MIR Ch.13	HW#3
14	Dec. 14, 2022	Chap. 20, Web crawling and indexes Chap. 21, Link analysis Advanced Topics: Social computing, Big data analytics (Some applications of IR: CLIR, Multimedia IR, and Semantic Search)	IIR Ch.20, MIR Ch.13 IIR Ch.21, MIR 2.7	Note: Only selected parts of Ch.21 will be introduced
15	Dec. 21, 2022	(Leave for IEEE BigData 2022) Term Project Presentation (Week 1).		Due: HW#3
16	Dec. 28, 2022	Term Project Presentation (Week 2).
17	Jan. 4, 2023	Term Project Presentation (Week 3).
18	Jan. 11, 2023	Term Project Presentation (Week 4).

Useful Links

Here're some useful links to information retrieval related resources or further readings.

Generic
- Wikipedia page on Information Retrieval
- Information Retrieval Resources
Some open source tools
- Apache Lucene/Solr
- Apache Hadoop, Spark
- Lemur Project, Indri, Galago
- Terrier
Academic
- International Conferences:
  - ACM SIGIR: International Conference on Information Retrieval
  - ACM CIKM: Conference on Information Knowledge and Management
  - WWW: International World Wide Web Conference
  - JCDL: Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
  - TREC: TExt Retrieval Conference
- Regional Conferences:
  - AIRS: Asia Information Retrieval Symposium
  - ECIR: European Conference on Information Retrieval
  - ECDL: European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries
  - ICADL: International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries
- Journals:
  - ACM TOIS: Transactions on Information Systems
  - JASIST: Journal of the American Society of Information Sciences
  - IP&M: Information Processing and Management
- Others:
  - WI: International Conference on Web intelligence
  - KDD: ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
  - ICDM: International Conference on Data Mining
  - IEEE TKDE: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
More Books
- Managing Gigabytes. I.H. Witten, A. Moffat, T.C. Bell. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.
- Information Retrieval. C. J. van Rijsbergen. Butterworths, 1979.
- Readings in Information Retrieval. K. Sparck Jones, P. Willett. Morgan Kaufmann, 1997.
- Automatic Text Processing, G. Salton, Addison-Wesley, 1989.

Programming Assignments and Projects

Please hand in your assignment before deadline according to the following instructions.

Submission Instructions

NOTE: Programs or projects in electronic files must be submitted directly to iSchool+.

If you cannot successfully submit your work, please contact with the TA or the instructor.

Homeworks

There will be about 3 programming homeworks that target at different IR tasks such as indexing, searching, and data analysis.

HW#1 : Index Construction
Note: Please remember to register your team members before we can allocate a random data file to your team as the test data.
HW#2 : Query Processing and Search
HW#3 : Text Classification

Projects

Term Project: paper presentation or system demonstration

Item	Description	Time
Proposal	You are required to submit the Term Project Proposal one week after midterm exam.	Nov. 16, 2022 (Wed.)
Topics	For System demonstration, you are suggested to attend the competition of AI Cup 2022. For paper presentations, the paper quality will greatly affect your score in term project. Please carefully select good papers to read.
Schedule	Due to our time limits, we might have to start the term project presentation as early as Dec. 21, 2022 (Tue.). * [NOTE] All presentations must be finished within the scheduled time slots, which will be the last four weeks in this semester. No other time slots will be avbailable.	Dec. 21, 28, 2022, Jan. 4, 11, 2023
Report	Each team is required to upload the final report after finishing your presentation. The final report should contain at least the following: presentation slides (for all teams), and source code, installation/execution instructions, team members and task responsibility (for system projects)	Jan. 13, 2023 (Fri.)

Exams

Midterm Exam: Nov. 7-11, 2022
- Date: Nov. 9, 2022 (Wed.)
- Time: 9:10am-12:00pm
- Location: R402, Pioneer Internationa R&D Building
- Range: Ch.1-9 (TBD)
Final Exam: Jan. 9-13, 2023
- Note: There will be no final exam in this course. Instead, you are required to finish a term project for system development or paper presentation.

Scores

Please check the homework submission site for more details.

E-mail: jhwang AT ntut . edu . tw
Created: Sep. 14, 2022.
Last Updated: Nov. 14, 2022.