Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Fall 2026

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 Program of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (IEECS). It's offered in English.

Course Information

Latest News

(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
Sec. 5.2-5.3 will be skimmed.
WeekDateContentReadingNote
1Sep. 9, 2026 Course Overview
Chap. 1, Boolean retrieval
IIR Ch.1, MIR Ch.1, MIR 8.1-8.2, Salton 8.1-8.3
2Sep. 16, 2026 (Leave for Czech project)
3Sep. 23, 2026 (Leave for Czech project)
4Sep. 30, 2026 Chap. 2, The term vocabulary and postings lists
Chap. 3, Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval
IIR Ch.2, MIR 8.2, 7.1.-7.2, Salton 8.6
IIR Ch.3, MIR 4.2, Salton Ch.9
5Oct. 7, 2026 Chap. 4, Index construction IIR Ch.4, MIR Ch.8 HW#1
Team Members Registration
6Oct. 14, 2026 Chap. 5, Index compression (selected)
Chap. 6, Scoring, term weighting, and the vector space model
IIR 5.1, MIR 6.1-6.3
IIR Ch.6, MIR 2.5
7Oct. 21, 2026 Chap. 7, Computing scores in a complete search system IIR Ch,7, MIR 2.5 Due: Team Member Registration
Due: HW#1
Term Project Proposal
HW#2
8Oct. 28, 2026 Chap. 8, Evaluation in information retreival
Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion
IIR Ch.8, MIR Ch.3
IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5
IIR Ch.11
9Nov. 4, 2026 Chap.11, Probabilistic Information Retrieval
Chap.12, Language Model
Introduction to Language Model
Due: HW#2
Note: Ch.11 & 12 will be briefly skimmed.
10Nov. 11, 2026 (Midterm Exam)
11Nov. 18, 2026 (Chap.18, Matrix decomposition & latent semantic indexing)
Introduction to Word Embeddings
(Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes
Chap. 14, Vector space classification )
IIR Ch.13
IIR 14.1-14.3
Due: Proposal
Note: Only selected topics in Ch.13 will be covered.
Only selected topics in Ch.14, will be covered.
12Nov. 25, 2026 Introduction to LLM
Introduction to RAG
( Sec. 15.1 Support vector machines
Chap. 16, Flat clustering & Chap. 17, Hierarchical clustering )
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.
13Dec. 2, 2026
Chap. 19, Web search basics
IIR Ch.19, MIR Ch.13 HW#3
14Dec. 9, 2026 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
15Dec. 16, 2026
Term Project Presentation: Week 1.
Due: HW#3
16Dec. 23, 2026 Term Project Presentation: Week 2.
17Dec. 30, 2026 (Flexible Learning) Term Project Presentation: Week 3 (online).
18Jan. 6, 2027 (Flexible Learning) Term Project Presentation: Week 4 (online).

Useful Links

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

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.

  1. 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.
  2. HW#2 : Query Processing and Search
  3. HW#3 (TBD) : LLM with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Projects

  1. Term Project: paper presentation or system demonstration
    ItemDescriptionTime
    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 also welcome to join the competition such as AI Cup 2026.
    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. 16, 2026 (Wed.).

    * [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. 16, 23, 30, 2026, Jan. 2, 2027
    ReportEach team is *required* to upload the final report after finishing your presentation.
    The final report should contain at least the following:
    1. presentation slides (for all teams), and
    2. source code, installation/execution instructions, team members and task responsibility (for system projects)
    Jan. 8, 2027 (Fri.)

Exams

  1. Midterm Exam: Nov. 2-6, 2026
  2. Final Exam: Dec. 18-24, 2026

Scores

Please check the homework submission site for more details.
E-mail: jhwang AT ntut . edu . tw
Created: Sep. 3, 2026.
Last Updated: Sep. 8, 2026.