Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2009

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

Course Information

Instructor: Jenq-Haur Wang
E-mail: mailbox at the domain of csie within NTUT, and my username is jhwang
Office: R1534, Technology Building (ext. 4238)
Office Hours: Tue. and Thu. 10:00-12:00am
Class Hours: Wed. 13:10-16:00pm, R1324, Technology Building
TA: Mr. D. L. Liang (R1424, Technology Building)
Prerequisite: data structures (and algorithms), 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: Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval, Addison-Wesley, 1999.
Backup webpage for Information Retrieval.
Note: In this semester, I switch the textbook and reference book. You can also refer to my previous slides last year.

Latest News

Jun. 25, 2009: The final scores for IR has been adjusted and finalized at 4PM, Jun. 25, 2009.
Jun. 23, 2009: Some errors in the final scores for IR has been corrected. No modification is possible after Jun. 25, 2009.
Jun. 22, 2009: The Final Scores for IR has been posted. If you have any questions, please contact me as soon as possible (before Jun. 25).
Jun. 18, 2009: The term project presentation has been completed. There are 48 students (in 28 teams) in total. Please be sure to submit your presentation slides and files. The final score will be announced soon (hopefully before Jun. 25, 2009). If you have any questions to your score, please be sure to contact the TA and the lecturer as soon as possible.
Jun. 16, 2009: *** [FINAL NOTICE] *** Up to now, there are 43 students (26 teams) scheduled for term project presentation. However, according to the records, there are 53 students enrolled in this class. If you cannot finish presentation in class on Jun. 17 (Wed.), your score for the term project will be 0 (zero). Note that there will be ***NO*** extension of term project presentation!
NO compensation is possible for the term project!
May 27, 2009: The schedule of term project presentation has been posted. Please prepare your presentation as soon as possible.
* [Important] *: There are still 13 students who haven't submitted their proposals for term project.
You can *ONLY* present within scheduled time slots (6/3, 6/10, 6/17).
If you cannot finish presentation within 3 weeks, penalty on score will be enforced.
May 13, 2009: The current list of proposals has been posted. Please check if there's any problem.
[Note]: If you haven't submitted your proposal, please do it *as soon as posssible*. This will also be counted in the final score.
Apr. 6, 2009: Deadline for final project proposal has been posted. Please submit your proposal to the TA as soon as possible.
Apr. 1, 2009: HW#2 has been announced.
Mar. 18, 2009: As requested by many students, the deadline for HW#1 has been extended to Apr. 1, 2009.
Mar. 11, 2009: HW#1 has been announced. [Note]: Please remember to e-mail your team members list first to the TA. (t6598006 AT ntut. edu .tw)
Feb. 3, 2009: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Spring 2009) has been setup.

Schedule

The slides were slightly modified from the Stanford CS276 class.
Note: IIR - Introduction to Information Retrieval, MIR - Modern Information Retrieval, Salton - Automatic Text Processing

Week	Date	Content	Reading	Note
1	Feb. 18, 2009	Course Overview
2	Feb. 25, 2009	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	Mar. 4, 2009	Chap. 3, Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval	IIR Ch.3, MIR 4.2, Salton Ch.9
4	Mar. 11, 2009	Chap. 4, Index construction Sec. 5.1 Statistical properties of terms in information retrieval	IIR Ch.4, 5.1, MIR Ch.8, 6.1-6.3	HW#1
5	Mar. 18, 2009	Chap. 6, Scoring, term weighting, and the vector space model	IIR Ch.6, MIR 2.5
6	Mar. 25, 2009	Chap. 7, Computing scores in a complete search system	IIR Ch,7, MIR 2.5
7	Apr. 1, 2009	Chap. 8, Evaluation in information retreival	IIR Ch.8, MIR Ch.3	HW#1 Due, HW#2
8	Apr. 8, 2009	Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion	IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5	Project Proposal
9	Apr. 15, 2009	(Midterm Exam)
10	Apr. 22, 2009	Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes	IIR Ch.13	HW#2 Due
11	Apr. 29, 2009	Chap. 14, Vector space classification Sec. 15.1 Support vector machines	IIR 14.1-14.3, 15.1
12	May 6, 2009	Chap. 16, Flat clustering & Chap. 17, Hierarchical clustering	IIR Ch.16-17, MIR 5.3
13	May 13, 2009	Chap. 19, Web search basics	IIR Ch.19, MIR Ch.13
14	May 20, 2009	Chap. 20, Web crawling and indexes Selected topics: Chap. 21, Link analysis	IIR Ch.20, MIR Ch.13 IIR Ch.21, MIR 2.7
15	May 27, 2009	Advanced Topics and Applications of Information Retrieval: CLIR, multimedia retrieval, semantic search
16	Jun. 3, 2009	Final Presentation: Week 1
17	Jun. 10, 2009	Final Presentation: Week 2
18	Jun. 17, 2009	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 online as follows.

Team members list: please e-mail your team members list to the TA if you have'nt done so (t6598006 AT the domain of NTUT).
[NOTE] Please check the current list of team members and homework scores and correct any errors with the TA if any.
Preparing submission files: compress your files (including source codes and documentation) into one single file (e.g., <TeamID>-HWn.ZIP). Remember to specify the names of your team members and student ID in the files and documentation.

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

Homeworks

HW#1: Indexing
Due: extended to Apr. 1, 2009 (3 weeks)
HW#2: Query processing and searching
Due: Apr. 22, 2009 (3 weeks)

Projects

Term Project: paper presentation or system demonstration

Item	Description	Time
Proposal	You are required to submit a proposal for final project around midterm (before end of April, 2009). Note: Please submit your proposals as soon as possible since it will be included in the final grading of the project.	before 4/30
Schedule	Here is the current schedule of system demonstration and paper presentation. Presentation will take place in the last three weeks (during Jun. 3, 2009 - Jun. 17, 2009). 6/3: 8 teams, 11 students 6/10: 9 teams, 14 students 6/17: 11 teams, 23 students	6/3, 6/10, 6/17
Report	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)	before 6/25

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 13-17, 2009
- Date: Apr. 15, 2009 (Wed.)
- Time: 13:10-16:00pm
- Location: R1324, Technology Building
- Range: IIR Ch.1-4, 5.1, 6-8
Reference Solution to the Midterm Exam
Final Exam: Jun. 15-19, 2009
- 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

TA's page for team members list and submission status for HW#1
Submission status for HW#2
Score for Midterm Exam
Final Scores: finalized at 4PM, Jun. 25, 2009.

E-mail: jhwang AT csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 3, 2009.
Last Updated: Jun. 25, 2009.