Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2010

This course offers an introduction to the principles and concepts in information retrieval, which is fundamental to modern Web search engines. In addition to Web search, other applications of information retrieval systems will also be described.

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 Wed. 10:00-12:00am
Class Hours: Mon. 13:10-16:00pm, R1324, Technology Building
TA: Mr. M.S.Lin (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:
- Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval, Addison-Wesley, 1999.
- Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, and Trevor Strohman, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice, Addison-Wesley, 2010
Backup webpage for Information Retrieval.

Latest News

Jun. 29, 2010: [NOTE] The final score has been updated.
Jun. 28, 2010: The final score has been posted on the Web page.
Jun. 21, 2010: All remaining 15 teams completed their presentation today.
*** [NOTE] *** Please remember to submit your final report (slides, and/or system source codes, documentation) on or before Jun. 25, 2010 (Fri.).
Jun. 14, 2010: Another 10 teams completed their presentation today. There are still 15 teams remained for the last class (on Jun. 21). Each team will be allowed for about 10 minutes. All student *must* complete the presentations on or before Jun. 21, 2010. No extension will be allowed for term project presentation. [NOTE] Each team has to submit their slides (and system) as the final report.
Jun. 7, 2010: 10 teams completed their presentations on Jun. 7. Please remember to upload your presentation file (and source code for system demos) to the homework submission site. You can also check further updates on the remaining schedules.
May 31, 2010: The (tentative) schedule for term project presentation has been updated. Please contact with the TA as soon as possible if there's any problem.
May 24, 2010: The (tentative) schedule for term project presentation has been posted. Please contact with the TA if there's any problem as soon as possible.
May 18, 2010: [NOTE] The score posted on May 13, 2010 was corrected.
May 17, 2010: The current topic list for term project is posted. If you have any preferrence of your presentation time slot, please e-mail to the TA as soon as possible before this Friday (May 21).
May 13, 2010: Score for HW#2 has been posted. Please check with the TA for more details.
May 6, 2010: The current score including HW#1 and Midterm exam has been posted. If you have any question, please contact with the TA.
May 3, 2010: The deadline for submitting term project proposal has been extended to May 10, 2010.
May 3, 2010: The score for midterm exam has been posted. If you have any problem, please contact with the TA as soon as possible.
Apr. 19, 2010: The deadline of HW#2 has been extended to May 3, 2010
Apr. 13, 2010: [NOTE] The midterm exam has been rescheduled to Apr. 26, 2010.
Apr. 12, 2010: HW#2 has been announced.
Apr. 12, 2010: *** [NOTE] *** Up to Apr. 12, submissions from 13 teams (35 students) were received for HW#1. For those not submitting your HW#1, please do so as soon as possible before the end of this week. Otherwise, further delays will be taken into account in your score.
Mar. 29, 2010: The deadline for HW#1 has been extended to Apr. 12, 2010.
Mar. 22, 2010: HW#1 has been announced.
Mar. 1, 2010: [NOTE] The classrooom has been changed to R1324, Technology Building.
Feb. 22, 2010: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Spring 2010) has been setup.

(Tentative) 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. 22, 2010	(Term Not Started Yet)
2	Mar. 1, 2010	Course Overview Chap. 1, Boolean retrieval	IIR Ch.1, MIR Ch.1, MIR 8.1-8.2, Salton 8.1-8.3
3	Mar. 8, 2010	Chap. 2, The term vocabulary and postings lists	IIR Ch.2, MIR 8.2, 7.1.-7.2, Salton 8.6
4	Mar. 15, 2010	Chap. 3, Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval	IIR Ch.3, MIR 4.2, Salton Ch.9
5	Mar. 22, 2010	Chap. 4, Index construction	IIR Ch.4, MIR Ch.8	HW#1
6	Mar. 29, 2010	Sec. 5.1 Statistical properties of terms in information retrieval Chap. 6, Scoring, term weighting, and the vector space model	IIR 5.1, MIR 6.1-6.3 IIR Ch.6, MIR 2.5
7	Apr. 5, 2010	(Tomb Sweeping Day or Ching-Ming Holidays)
8	Apr. 12, 2010	Chap. 7, Computing scores in a complete search system	IIR Ch,7, MIR 2.5	HW#1 Due, HW#2
9	Apr. 19, 2010	Chap. 8, Evaluation in information retreival	IIR Ch.8, MIR Ch.3
10	Apr. 26, 2010	(Midterm Exam)
11	May 3, 2010	Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion	IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5	HW#2 Due
12	May 10, 2010	Chap. 19, Web search basics	IIR Ch.19, MIR Ch.13	Project Proposal Due
13	May 17, 2010	Chap. 20, Web crawling and indexes (Selected topics: Chap. 21, Link analysis)	IIR Ch.20, MIR Ch.13 IIR Ch.21, MIR 2.7
14	May 24, 2010	Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes Chap. 14, Vector space classification	IIR Ch.13 IIR 14.1-14.3
15	May 31, 2010	Sec. 15.1 Support vector machines Chap. 16, Flat clustering & Chap. 17, Hierarchical clustering	IIR 15.1 IIR Ch.16-17, MIR 5.3	Only Sec.15.1 and parts of Ch.16 & 17 will be introduced
16	Jun. 7, 2010	Final Presentation: Week 1	10 teams completed
17	Jun. 14, 2010	Final Presentation: Week 2	10 teams completed
18	Jun. 21, 2010	Final Presentation: Week 3	15 teams completed

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 at: http://140.124.183.16/ir/.

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

Homeworks

HW#1: Indexing
Extended Due: Apr. 12, 2010
HW#2: Query processing and searching
Due: Extended to May 3, 2010

Projects

Term Project: paper presentation or system demonstration

Item	Description	Time
Proposal	You are required to submit a proposal for final project after midterm exam (Extened to May 10, 2010). Note: Please submit your proposals as soon as possible since it will be included in the final grading of the project.	(May 10, 2010)
Topics	The current list of topics for term project (as of May 17, 2010)
Schedule	The final schedule of term porject presentation (updated on Jun. 21, 2010) was scheduled in the last three weeks of this semester.
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)	(Jun. 25, 2010)

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 19-23, 2010
- Date: Extended to Apr. 26, 2010 (Mon.)
- Time: 13:10-16:00pm
- Location: R1324, Technology Building
- Range: Ch. 1-8
Final Exam: Jun. 21-25, 2010
- 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

Score for midterm exam
Current Score (as of May 06, 2010): including HW#1 and Midterm Exam
Updated Score (as of May 17, 2010): including HW#1, HW#2, and Midterm Exam (updated from May 13 version)
Final Score (updated on Jun. 29, 2010)

E-mail: jhwang AT csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 22, 2010.
Last Updated: Jun. 29, 2010.