Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2011

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. This course will be taught in English.

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: Wed. and Thu. 10:00-12:00am
Class Hours: Wed. 13:10-16:00pm, R327, 6th Teaching Building
TA: Mr. C.H.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: 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.
- Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, and Trevor Strohman, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice, Addison-Wesley, 2010

Latest News

Jun. 25, 2011: [NOTE] Please remember to upload your final reports as soon as possible before Jun. 27, 2011 (Monday).
Jun. 24, 2011: [NOTE] There are two students who DID NOT present their term projects: 99598034, and 96590310. This will result in a score of 0 for your term project.
Also, there are four students who DID NOT turn in their HW#2: 96590301, 96590325, 96590326, 96590328. If you want to submit your HW#2, please contact with TA before Jun. 27, 2011 (Monday).
Jun. 1, 2011: *** [NOTE] *** All presentations for term projects MUST be finsihed WITHIN the four time slots (Jun. 1, 8, 15, and 22). No other time slots will be avbailable.
May 25, 2011: [*** ATTENTION ***] Since we have one student diagnosed as tuberculosis,
EVERY student enrolled in this course MUST attend the talk by CDC, Taiwan and take the X-ray exam on May 31, 2011 (Tue.).
- Talk: 10:20am-11:00am, at the 2nd Lecture Hall, Complex Building
- X-Ray Exam: 11:00am-12:00am, at Sanitary and Health Care Division, 1st Teaching Building.
If you have any concerns or questions about the disease, you can ask the medical persons in the talk.
If you cannot attend the talk and take the exam, CDC Taiwan will follow up with you.
May 24, 2011: [NOTE] The current schedule for term presentation has been posted. Please check if there's any mistake. (As of May 20, 2011, there are 43 teams for term project presentation.)
May 12, 2011: [NOTE] As of May 11, 2011, there are 41 teams for term project presentation. Due to our time limits, we will start the term project presentation from Jun. 1, 2011. You have to reserve the time slots in our next class (on May 18, 2011).
Apr. 13, 2011: The midterm exam will be held on Apr. 27, 2011.
Apr. 13, 2011: HW#2 has been announced. The deadline will be extended to May 4, 2011.
Mar. 30, 2011: HW#1 has been announced.
Feb. 23, 2011: [NOTE] This course will be taught in English since there are international graduate students enrolled in this class.
Feb. 23, 2011: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Spring 2011) 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. 23, 2011	Course Overview
2	Mar. 2, 2011	Chap. 1, Boolean retrieval	IIR Ch.1, MIR Ch.1, MIR 8.1-8.2, Salton 8.1-8.3
3	Mar. 9, 2011	(TA demo)
4	Mar. 16, 2011	(sick leave)
5	Mar. 23, 2011	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
6	Mar. 30, 2011	Chap. 4, Index construction	IIR Ch.4, MIR Ch.8	HW#1
7	Apr. 6, 2011	(Compensation Leave for Sports Day)
8	Apr. 13, 2011	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	HW#1 Due, HW#2
9	Apr. 20, 2011	Chap. 7, Computing scores in a complete search system Chap. 8, Evaluation in information retreival	IIR Ch,7, MIR 2.5 IIR Ch.8, MIR Ch.3	Term project proposal
10	Apr. 27, 2011	(Midterm Exam)
11	May 4, 2011	Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion	IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5	Project Proposal Due, HW#2 Due
12	May 11, 2011	Chap. 19, Web search basics Chap. 20, Web crawling and indexes	IIR Ch.19, MIR Ch.13 IIR Ch.20, MIR Ch.13
13	May 18, 2011	Chap. 21, Link analysis Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes Chap. 14, Vector space classification	IIR Ch.21, MIR 2.7 IIR Ch.13 IIR 14.1-14.3	Presentation time slot booking Only selected topics in Ch.21, 13, & 14 will be covered.
14	May 25, 2011	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 selected parts of Ch.16 & 17 will be introduced
15	Jun. 1, 2011	Final Presentation: Week 1	10/11 teams presented
16	Jun. 8, 2011	Final Presentation: Week 2
17	Jun. 15, 2011	Final Presentation: Week 3
18	Jun. 22, 2011	Final 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
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://140.124.183.39/IR/.

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

Homeworks

HW#1: Indexing
Due: Apr. 13, 2011
HW#2: Searching
Due: extended to May 4, 2011

Projects

Term Project: paper presentation or system demonstration

Item	Description	Time
Proposal	You are required to submit a proposal for term project one week after midterm exam (May 4, 2011).	(May 4, 2011)
Topics	Topics for term projects will include system demostration and paper presentation. You can check the current list of topics for each presentation. As of May 20, 2011, there are 86 students in 42 teams for term project presentation. This includes 20 system demos and 23 paper presentations.
Schedule	Due to our time limits, we will start the term project presentation from Jun. 1, 2011. Each team is allocated up to 15 minutes for your presentation (and system demo). The available time slots will be the last four weeks of this semester. Please check the current presentation schedule for term porject as arranged on May 18, 2011. * [NOTE] * All presentations must be finsihed within the four time slots. No other time slots will be avbailable.	Jun. 1, 8, 15, 22, 2011
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. 27, 2011 (Monday)

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 18-22, 2011
- Date: Apr. 27, 2011 (Wed.)
- Time: 13:10-16:00pm
- Location: R327, 6th Teaching Building
- Range: Chap. 1-8
Final Exam: Jun. 20-24, 2011
- 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 csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 23, 2011.
Last Updated: Jun. 25, 2011.