Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2014

This course offers an introduction to the principles and concepts in information retrieval (IR), which is fundamental to modern Web search engines.
In addition to Web search, other applications of information retrieval systems will also be described.
This year, the course is offered at graduate-level as well as the International Graduate Program in College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). It's 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: Tue. and Thu. 9:00-12:00am
Class Hours: Fri. 9:10-12:00am, R334, Technology Building
TA: Mr. Huang (at 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:
- Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, and Trevor Strohman, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice, Addison-Wesley, 2010
- 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.

Latest News

Jun. 26, 2014: [NOTE] The final score has been posted. Please check if there's any question before 12am, Jun. 27, 2014 (Fri.).
May 26, 2014: [NOTE] There are 10 students who haven't submitted their HW#1, and 8 students who haven't submitted their term project proposal. Please do it as soon as possible.
(HW#1: 99590304, 102598034, 102598067, 101598044, 102598038, 102598025, 99306351, 99590341, 99590342, 99590348)
(Proposal: 99590301, 102598041, 101598044, 102598025, 99306351, 99590341, 99590342, 99590348))
May 20, 2014: [Note] Due to many requests from students, we extend the submission deadline of HW#2 for one extra week (to May 30, 2014).
Also, more clarifications to the slides of HW#2 have been added. Please check if you still have any question.
May 12, 2014: ***[NOTE]*** The TA cannot execute HW#1 of the following teams. Please check with the TA as soon as possible: 102598003, 99820318, 99310317, 101598059, 102598043, 102598055, 102598054, 102598065, 102598045, 102998003.
(Only one member is listed per team.)
May 9, 2014: HW#2 has been announced.
May 7, 2014: The tentaive schedule of term project presentation has been posted. Please check if there's any problem. If you haven't submitted your proposal, please do it *as soon as possible*. It will be counted in the final score.
May 7, 2014: [NOTE] Since I'm going to participate in PAKDD 2014, the class on May 16 will be postponed.
Apr. 18, 2014: Note that the submission deadline for term project proposal has been extended to May 2, 2014.
Apr. 11, 2014: [NOTE] The submission deadlines for both HW#1 and term project proposal have been extended to Apr. 18, 2014. Be sure to get the test data and work on your homework as soon as possible.
Apr. 10, 2014: Since HW#1 requires each team to process different parts of dataset, you have to determine your team member list *as soon as possible*.
Mar. 21, 2014: HW#1 has been announced. Also, the rules for term project proposal has been posted. Please submit your team member list before Mar. 28, 2014 (Fri.).
Feb. 27, 2014: Note that the maximum number of students per team are relaxed as follows: 4 for undergraduates, and 2 for graduate students.
Feb. 20, 2014: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Spring 2014) 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. 21, 2014	Course Overview
2	Feb. 28, 2014	(228 Memorial Day)
3	Mar. 7, 2014	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
4	Mar. 14, 2014	Chap. 3, Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval	IIR Ch.3, MIR 4.2, Salton Ch.9
5	Mar. 21, 2014	Chap. 4, Index construction	IIR Ch.4, MIR Ch.8	HW#1 term project proposal
6	Mar. 28, 2014	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	Due: Team Member Registration
7	Apr. 4, 2014	(Children's Day)
8	Apr. 11, 2014	Chap. 7, Computing scores in a complete search system	IIR Ch,7, MIR 2.5
9	Apr. 18, 2014	Chap. 8, Evaluation in information retreival	IIR Ch.8, MIR Ch.3	Due: HW#1
10	Apr. 25, 2014	(Midterm Exam)
11	May 2, 2014	Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion	IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5	Due: Proposal
12	May 9, 2014	Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes Chap. 14, Vector space classification	IIR Ch.13 IIR 14.1-14.3	HW#2 Note: Only selected topics in Ch.13 & Ch.14 will be covered.
13	May 16, 2014	(Leave for PAKDD 2014)
14	May 23, 2014	Sec. 15.1 Support vector machines Chap. 16, Flat clustering & Chap. 17, Hierarchical clustering	IIR Sec.15.1 IIR Ch.16-17, MIR 5.3	Note: Only selected topics in 15-1, 16, & 17 will be covered.
15	May 30, 2014	Chap. 19, Web search basics Chap. 20, Web crawling and indexes Chap. 21, Link analysis Advanced topics and applications of IR: CLIR, Multimedia IR, and Semantic Search	IIR Ch.19, MIR Ch.13 IIR Ch.20, MIR Ch.13 IIR Ch.21, MIR 2.7	Due: HW#2 Note: Only selected parts of Ch.21 will be introduced
16	Jun. 6, 2014	Final Presentation: Week 1 - 10 teams completed.
17	Jun. 13, 2014	Final Presentation: Week 2
18	Jun. 20, 2014	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.

Submission site: http://140.124.183.31/net2ftp
FTP server: localhost
User name: Your student ID

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

Homeworks

There will be about 2 programming homeworks that target at different IR tasks.

HW#1: Vector Space Retrieval (Indexing and Search)
Due: Apr. 18, 2014
- Test collection: ClueWeb09 dataset will be used as your test collection. Each team will be randomly assigned one partial WARC file, which contains about 10,000 Wab pgaes in 1GB. Before obtaining the test data file, you can first get the WARC file format, and a sample file from ClueWeb09 dataset to develop/test your prototype system.
- You can check the assigned list of test data files. Note that there's an upper limit of network traffic for the server, please download *ONLY ONE* assigned file for your team. If you need all these files, please contact with the TA.
- Member list: Please check the current list of team members for HW#1.
HW#2: Text Classification
Due: extended to May 30, 2014
- Test collection: Reuters-21578 dataset will be used as your test collection.

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. As of May 28, 2014, 63 students in 39 teams submitted their proposal for term project presentation. There are 8 students who haven't submitted their proposal. Please so it as soon as possible.	extended to May 2, 2014 (Fri.)
Topics	The list of topics in term project proposals has been posted. There are 17 papers, 16 demos, and 6 surveys in term project presentation. For paper presentations, the paper quality will greatly affect your score in term project. Please carefully select good papers to read.
Schedule	The presentation schedule for term project has been arranged. Please check if there's any problem. Due to our time limits, we might probably start the term project presentation on May 30, 2014 (Fri.). Each team is allocated up to 8 ~~12-15~~ 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 at your earliest convenience in your proposal.	Jun. 6, 13, 20, 2014
Report	Each team is required to upload the final report after finishing your presentation. 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. 23, 2014 (Mon.)

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 14-18, 2014
- Date: postponed to Apr 25, 2014 (Fri.)
- Time: 9:10-12:0apm
- Location: R334, Technology Building
- Range: (TBD)
Final Exam: Jun. 16-20, 2014
- 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.

The current score (as of Jun. 27, 2014)

E-mail: jhwang AT csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 20, 2014.
Last Updated: Jun. 27, 2014.