Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2015

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: Mon. 9:10-12:00am, R627, 6th Teaching Building
TA: Mr. Tsai (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

Jul. 1, 2015: *** [NOTE} *** The final score has been posted. Please check if there's any questions before 11:59AM, Jul. 3, 2015 (Fri.).
Jun. 21, 2015: [NOTE] All teams have to upload your presentation slides and source code and documentation as the final report before Jun. 30, 2015 (Tue.).
May 26, 2015: [NOTE] The schedule of term project presentation has been announced. Please check if there's any question as soon as possible.
May 11, 2015: HW#3 has been announced.
Apr. 22, 2015: [NOTE] There are two students who didn't belong to any team in HW#1 & HW#2: 97820301, 100590331. Please contact with us as soon as possible.
Apr. 13, 2015: [NOTE] HW#1 has been checked with some findings:
1. Some teams share very similar or even the same source code. In the case of plagiarism, scores will be discounted (e.g. averaged across all teams sharing the same code).
2. If you utilize open source tools by directly using the executables files, please remember to modify and re-submit your source code that calls the library functions or APIs.
3. If you are not sure if you need to re-submit your homework, please contact with the TA or me as soon as possible for more details.
- [NOTE] 請注意: 若不同組別作業程式碼非常類似或抄襲, 分數將會視情形打折. 若使用 open source 工具, 卻直接使用現有執行檔, 請重新上傳呼叫 library functions 或呼叫 API 的程式碼, 若不清楚, 請盡速與助教或我聯絡.
Apr. 13, 2015: HW#2 has been announced. Please check if the team members are correct or not.
Mar. 30, 2015: Due to the delay in the release of test data, the deadline of HW#1 has been extended for one week. The new deadline is Apr. 6, 2015.
Mar. 16, 2015: HW#1 has been announced. Please list your team members in your HW#1.
Note that the list of randomly allocated data files are available for download on the homework submission site: https://140.124.183.13/. (under the folder: shared/HW1_DataSet)
Mar. 5, 2015: [NOTE] Due to the capacity of the original classroom, our new classroom will be R627, 6th Teaching Building. (effective from Mar. 9, 2015)
Feb. 25, 2015: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Spring 2015) 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	Mar. 2, 2015	Course Overview
2	Mar. 9, 2015	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. 16, 2015	Chap. 3, Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval	IIR Ch.3, MIR 4.2, Salton Ch.9	HW#1
4	Mar. 23, 2015	Chap. 4, Index construction	IIR Ch.4, MIR Ch.8	Due: Team Member Registration
5	Mar. 30, 2015	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	term project proposal
6	Apr. 6, 2015	(Compensation Leave for Tomb Sweeping Day)		Due: HW#1
7	Apr. 13, 2015	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	HW#2
8	Apr. 20, 2015	Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion	IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5
9	Apr. 27, 2015	(Midterm Exam)		Due: HW#2
10	May 4, 2015	Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes	IIR Ch.13	Due: Proposal
11	May 11, 2015	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.13, Ch.14, & Sec. 15-1 will be covered.
12	May 18, 2015	(TA explanation on HW#3, datasets, and grading on previous homeworks)	IIR Ch.16-17, MIR 5.3	Note: Only selected topics in Chap. 16, & 17 will be covered.
13	May 25, 2015	Chap. 16, Flat clustering & Chap. 17, Hierarchical clustering	IIR Ch.16-17, MIR 5.3
14	Jun. 1, 2015	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 Social search	IIR Ch.19, MIR Ch.13 IIR Ch.20, MIR Ch.13 IIR Ch.21, MIR 2.7	Due: HW#3 Note: Only selected parts of Ch.21 will be introduced
15	Jun. 8, 2015	Final Presentation: Week 1: 9 teams completed.
16	Jun. 15, 2015	Final Presentation: Week 2: 9 teams completed.
17	Jun. 22, 2015	Final Presentation: Week 3: 11 teams completed.
18	Jun. 29, 2015	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
Some open source tools
- Apache Lucene/Solr
- Apache Hadoop, Spark
- Lemur Project, Indri, Galago
- Terrier
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: https://140.124.183.13/.

Account: Use your student ID as the account and password at your first login. Please change the password as soon as possible for better security.
Filename: Compress your source code and related files into one compressed file. Please name it according to your ID and each homework. For example, [id]_HW1.zip.

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

Homeworks

There will be about 2-3 programming homeworks that target at different IR tasks such as indexing, searching, and data analysis.

HW#1: Vector Space Retrieval -- Indexing
Due: extended to Apr. 6, 2015
- Note that the list of randomly allocated data files are available on the homework submission site.
- Each team can choose any of the allocated files for the team members.
- Please check the current list of team members. (as of Apr. 13, 2015)
HW#2: Vector Space Retrieval -- Searching
Due: Apr. 27, 2015
HW#3: Text Classification
Due: Jun. 1, 2015

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, 2015 (Mon.)
Topics	For paper presentations, the paper quality will greatly affect your score in term project. Please carefully select good papers to read.
Schedule	Due to our time limits, we have to start the term project presentation on Jun. 8, 2015 (Mon.). * [NOTE] All presentations must be finished within the scheduled time slots, which will be the last four weeks in this semester. No other time slots will be avbailable. If you have preferred time slots, please book at your earliest convenience in your proposal. The current schedule of term project presentation has been announced. (As of Jun. 29, 2015, there are 36 teams in total.)	Jun. 8, 15, 22, 29, 2015
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. 30, 2015 (Tue.)

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 22-28, 2015
- Date: Apr 27, 2015 (Mon.)
- Time: 9:10-12:0apm
- Location: R1322, Technology Building
- Range: Ch.1-9
Final Exam: Jun. 24-30, 2015
- 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 final score (as of Jul. 2, 2015)

E-mail: jhwang AT csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 25, 2015.
Last Updated: Jul. 2, 2015.