Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2008

This course offers an introduction to the principles and concepts in information retrieval. In this course, you will learn the operations of modern search engines, among other applications of information retrieval systems.

Course Information

Instructor: Jenq-Haur Wang
E-mail: mailbox at the domain of csie DOT ntut, and my username is jhwang
Office: Complex Building, R312-1, ext. 4238
Office Hours: Tue. and Thu. 10:00-12:00am
Class Hours: Tue. 4:10-5:00pm, Wed. 10:10-12:00am, R208, Complex Building
TA: Mr. Chien (at R502-2, Complex Building)
Prerequisite: data structures (and algorithms), working experience of high-level programming languages
Textbook: Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval, Addison-Wesley, 1999.
References: Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schuetze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press. 2008.
Backup webpage for Information Retrieval.

Latest News

Jun. 23, 2008: The final score has been posted on the homepage and in front of my office. Please check if there's any problem before 4:00PM, Jun. 24.
Jun. 3, 2008: Please prepare your presentation slides in English if possible. This will help our international students better understand the content.
May 28, 2008: Initial schedule for term project presentation is available. Please check if it's correct or not.
May 27, 2008: The schedule for final project presentation will be arranged shortly in a first-come-first-served manner. Please choose your time slot to the TA.
May 27, 2008: Score for HW#2 has been posted.
Apr. 29, 2008: Score for midterm exam and HW#1 has been posted.
Apr. 23, 2008: A refence solution to midterm exam is posted. If you have any questions or comments, please contact with the TA or the instructor.
Apr. 23, 2008: HW#3 has been announced.
Apr. 8, 2008: The midterm exam is scheduled on Apr. 16, 2008.
Apr. 3, 2008: Rules for the final project proposal has been posted on the Web site.
Mar. 25, 2008: HW#2 has been announced.
Mar. 6, 2008: HW#1 has been announced.
Mar. 6, 2008: TA of this course is Mr. Chien.
Feb. 18, 2008: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Spring 2008) has been setup.

Schedule

Note: This is a tentative schedule which is subject to changes according to the interactions between students and the instructor.
Note: IIR - Introduction to Information Retrieval, MIR - Modern Information Retrieval, Salton - Automatic Text Processing

Week	Date	Content	Reading	Note
1	Feb. 19, 2008	Course Overview & Chap. 1, Introduction (PDF)	MIR Ch.1
1	Feb. 20, 2008	Chap. 8, Indexing and Searching (PDF)	MIR 8.1-8.3, IIR Ch.1, Salton 8.1-8.3
2	Feb. 26, 2008	Chap. 8, Indexing and Searching	MIR Ch.8, IIR Ch.2, Salton 8.6
2	Feb. 27, 2008	Chap. 7, Text Operations (PDF)	MIR 7.1-7.2, Salton Ch.9
3	Mar. 4, 2008	Chap. 7, Text Operations	IIR Ch.3
3	Mar. 5, 2008	Chap. 6, Text Languages	MIR Ch.6, IIR 5.1	HW#1
4	Mar. 11-12, 2008	Chap. 2, Modeling	MIR Ch.2, IIR Ch.6,11,18
5	Mar. 18-19, 2008	Chap. 3, Retrieval Evaluation	MIR Ch.3, IIR Ch.8
6	Mar. 25, 2008	Chap. 4, Query Languages	MIR Ch.4	HW#2
6	Mar. 26, 2008	Chap. 5, Query Operations	MIR Ch.5, IIR Ch.9
7	Apr. 1-2, 2008	Chap. 5, Query Operations (Query Expansion)	IIR Ch.9
8	Apr. 8-9, 2008	(Summary of Text Retrieval)		Project Proposal
9	Apr. 15-16, 2008	(Midterm Exam)
10	Apr. 22-23, 2008	Chap. 13, Searching the Web (Slides from IIR Ch.19)	MIR Ch.13, IIR Ch.19	HW#3
11	Apr. 29-30, 2008	Chap. 13, Searching the Web
12	May 6-7, 2008	Advanced Topics and Applications of Information Retrieval: An Introduction
13	May 13-14, 2008	Advanced Topics and Applications: CLIR and Multimedia retrieval
14	May 20-21, 2008	Advanced Retrieval Technologies: Semantic retrieval and Web search
15	May 27-28, 2008	Advanced Topics: Information Extraction
16	Jun. 3-4, 2008	Final Presentation: Week 1
17	Jun. 10-11, 2008	Final Presentation: Week 2
18	Jun. 17-18, 2008	Final Presentation: Week 3

Useful Links

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

Generic
- Wikipedia page on Information Retrieval
- Information Retrieval Resources
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 the TA by e-mail as follows.

Before submission: compress your files (including source codes and documentation) into one single file (for example, 9659xxxx-HW1.ZIP). Remember to specify your name and student ID in the files and documentation.
E-mail of TA: alowblow AT hotmail DOT com
or t5598047 AT ntut . edu DOT tw (if the previous e-mail doesn't work).

You will get a confirmation e-mail from the TA after receiving your submission. If you cannot successfully e-mail your work, please contact with the TA or the instructor.

Homeworks

Mar. 5, 2008: HW#1 - Indexing
Due: Mar. 19, 2008
Mar. 25, 2008: HW#2 - Term Weighting
Due: Apr. 16, 2008 (three weeks)
Apr. 23, 2008: HW#3 - Searching
Due: May 14, 2008 (three weeks)

Projects

NOTE: Please prepare your presentation slides in English if possible. This will help our international students better understand.

Final Project: paper presentation or system demonstration starting from Jun. 3, 2008

Item	Description	Time
Proposal	You are required to submit a proposal for final project before the end of April. You can check the current list of proposed projects (31 students in 19 teams, as of Jun. 2, 2008). Note: For those not submitted their proposals yet, please submit it as soon as possible. It will be included in the final grading of the project.	Before end of April (passed)
Schedule	The schedule of system demonstration and paper presentation is arranged in a first-come-first-served manner. Please check your time slot in the current tentative presentation schedule. Note: All teams (including system demonstration and paper presentation) should give presentation (in Chinese or English) no later than Jun. 18, 2008. Please check the presentation schedule for more details about the rules.	The available time slots are: 6/3, 6/4, 6/10, 6/11, 6/17, 6/18.

NOTE: All homeworks and projects should be finished and submitted before Jun. 18, 2008. It's a *firm* deadline, and no further extension of deadline will be offered.

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 14-18, 2008.
- Date: Apr. 16, 2008 (Wed.)
- Time: 10:00-12:00am
- Location: R208, Complex Building
- Range: MIR Chap. 1-8 (or IIR Ch.1-3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 18)
Final Exam: Jun. 16-20, 2008.
- Note: There will be no final exam in this course. Instead, you are requested to finish a term project or paper presentation.

Scores

E-mail: jhwang AT csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 18, 2008.
Last Updated: Jun. 23, 2008.