Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2012

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. 9:00-12:00am
Class Hours: Thu. 9:10-12:00am, R1322, Technology Building
TA: Mr. H.C.Liu (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, 2012: [NOTE] The final score has been posted. Please check if there's any question before Jun. 26, 2012. No modification of scores will be allowed after Jun. 26, 2012.
Jun. 21, 2012: *** [IMPORTANT] *** All of the 33 teams have finished presentation. Please remember to submit your final report online.
Note that the score of term project includes: (1) the proposal, (2) the presentation, and (3) the final report.
If you didn't submit any proposal in advance, please convert your oral presenations into a report on paper in 1-2 pages (excluding the title, team members, and appendix).
This report *must* be submitted to the TA's desk (in R1424, Technology Building) before 4PM, Jun. 22, 2012 (Fri.).
*** 重要事項 *** 如之前已提醒各位同學, 由於期末報告的分數包括: (1) proposal (2) 上台報告 (3) 書面報告 (投影片檔案), 如果你缺少任何一項, 例如未繳交 proposal, 或是沒有上台報告, 請務必準備原先預計報告的投影片檔, 並將 口頭報告的內容轉換為1頁以上2頁以內的書面報告 (頁數不包含封面組別標題附錄等), 請於 本週五(6/22)下午4點以前, 務必將以上書面報告放置在科研1424 劉助教的桌上, 逾時將不計入成績.
至於最後分數計算則由助教決定 (例如: 遲交的打折比例, 或是缺交項目所佔的分數比例等).
Jun. 14, 2012: [NOTE] As of Jun. 14, 2012, there are 31 teams (including 12 system demos, and 19 paper presentations) in the final schedule of term project presentation.
There are 11 teams remained to present in the last time slot (Jun. 21, 2012).
Please be sure to upload your final report after presentation.
Jun. 8, 2012: [NOTE] As of Jun. 8, 2012, there are 31 teams (including 11 system demos, and 20 paper presentations) in total.
Jun. 6, 2012: [NOTE] As of Jun. 6, 2012, there are 29 teams (including 11 system demos, and 18 paper presentations) in the term project.
Please note that the term project *MUST* be orally presented within the 3 time slots on: 6/7, 6/14, 6/21. No other time slots are avilable.
Jun. 2, 2012: [NOTE] As of Jun. 1, 2012, there are 28 teams (including 10 system demos, and 18 paper presentations) in term project.
Jun. 1, 2012: [NOTE] The tentative schedule of term project presentation has been arranged. Please check if you have any question about it.
May 10, 2012: HW#3 has been announced.
Apr. 11, 2012: The deadline of term project proposal is Apr. 19, 2012. Please submit it online as soon as possible.
Mar. 15, 2012: HW#1 has been announced. (Due: Apr. 5, 2012).
Please register your team members via the homework submission site as soon as possible.
You can first use the sample files provided by ClueWeb09 for developing your program. After teams are confirmed, the test dataset will be assigned to each team by TA.
Feb. 16, 2012: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Spring 2012) 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, 2012	Course Overview
2	Mar. 1, 2012	Chap. 1, Boolean retrieval	IIR Ch.1, MIR Ch.1, MIR 8.1-8.2, Salton 8.1-8.3
3	Mar. 8, 2012	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
4	Mar. 15, 2012	Chap. 4, Index construction	IIR Ch.4, MIR Ch.8	HW#1
5	Mar. 22, 2012	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
6	Mar. 29, 2012	(Team Registration/Description of Term project proposal )
7	Apr. 5, 2012	(Compensation Leave for Sports Day)		Due: HW#1
8	Apr. 12, 2012	Chap. 7, Computing scores in a complete search system	IIR Ch,7, MIR 2.5	HW#2
9	Apr. 19, 2012	Chap. 8, Evaluation in information retreival	IIR Ch.8, MIR Ch.3	Due: Proposal
10	Apr. 26, 2012	(Midterm Exam)		Due: HW#2
11	May 3, 2012	Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes	IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5 IIR Ch.13	Note: Only selected topics in Ch.13 will be covered.
12	May 10, 2012	Chap. 14, Vector space classification Sec. 15.1 Support vector machines	IIR 14.1-14.3 IIR Sec.15.1	HW#3 Note: Only selected topics in Ch. 14 & Sec.15.1 will be covered.
13	May 17, 2012	Chap. 16, Flat clustering & Chap. 17, Hierarchical clustering	IIR Ch.16-17, MIR 5.3	Note: Only selected topics in Ch.16 & 17 will be covered.
14	May 24, 2012	Chap. 19, Web search basics	IIR Ch.19, MIR Ch.13	Due: HW#3 Due: Presentation time slot booking
15	May 31, 2012	Chap. 20, Web crawling and indexes Chap. 21, Link analysis (Advanced topics and 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
16	Jun. 7, 2012	Final Presentation: Week 1 (9 teams completed.)
17	Jun. 14, 2012	Final Presentation: Week 2 (11 teams completed.)
18	Jun. 21, 2012	Final Presentation: Week 3 (13 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://140.124.183.39/IR/.

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

Homeworks

HW#1: Indexing
Due: Apr. 5, 2012
HW#2: Query processing & searching
Due: Apr. 26, 2012
HW#3: Text Classification
Due: May 24, 2012

Projects

Term Project: paper presentation or system demonstration

Item	Description	Time
Proposal	You are required to submit a proposal for term project before midterm exam (Apr. 19, 2012).	Apr. 19, 2012
Topics	Topics for term projects include system demostration and paper presentation. In paper presentations, the paper quality will greatly affect your score in term project. Please carefully select good papers to read.
Schedule	Final Schedule of term project presentation has been arranged, with 33 teams in total (12 system demos, and 21 paper presentations) (as of Jun. 21, 2012) Due to our time limits, we will start the term project presentation on Jun. 7, 2012. Each team is allocated up to 20 minutes for your presentation (and system demo). * [NOTE] All presentations must be finished within the scheduled time slots, which will be the last three weeks of this semester. No other time slots will be avbailable. If you have preferred time slots, please book before May 24, 2012.	Jun. 7, 14, 21, 2012
Report	Please upload your final report before Jun. 25, 2012 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, 2012 (Monday)

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 16-20, 2012
- Date: Extended to Apr 26, 2012 (Wed.)
- Time: 9:10-12:00am
- Location: R1322, Technology Building
- Range: Ch.1-8
Final Exam: Jun. 18-22, 2012
- 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.

Final Score (as of Jun. 25, 2012)

E-mail: jhwang AT csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 16, 2012.
Last Updated: Jun. 26, 2012.