Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2016

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

Latest News

(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
WeekDateContentReadingNote
1Feb. 22, 2016Course Overview
2Feb. 29, 2016 (Compensation Leave for Peace Memorial Day)
3Mar. 7, 2016 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
4Mar. 14, 2016 Chap. 3, Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval IIR Ch.3, MIR 4.2, Salton Ch.9 HW#1
5Mar. 21, 2016 Chap. 4, Index construction
Sec. 5.1 Statistical properties of terms in information retrieval
IIR Ch.4, MIR Ch.8
IIR 5.1, MIR 6.1-6.3
6Mar. 28, 2016 Chap. 6, Scoring, term weighting, and the vector space model IIR Ch.6, MIR 2.5 Term Project Proposal
Due: Team Member Registration
7Apr. 4, 2016 (Leave for Children's Day / Tomb Sweeping Day) Due: HW#1
8Apr. 11, 2016 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
9Apr. 18, 2016 Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5 Proposal
10Apr. 25, 2016 (Midterm Exam)
11May 2, 2016 Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes IIR Ch.13 Due: HW#2
Due: Proposal
12May 9, 2016 Chap. 14, Vector space classification
Sec. 15.1 Support vector machines
IIR 14.1-14.3
IIR Sec.15.1
Note: Only selected topics in Ch.13, Ch.14, & Sec. 15-1 will be covered.
13May 16, 2016 Chap. 16, Flat clustering & Chap. 17, Hierarchical clustering IIR Ch.16-17, MIR 5.3 HW#3
Note: Only selected topics in Ch.16 & Ch. 17 will be covered.
14May 23, 2016 Chap. 19, Web search basics
Chap. 20, Web crawling and indexes
Chap. 21, Link analysis
Advanced Topics: Social computing, Big data analytics
(Some 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
Note: Only selected parts of Ch.21 will be introduced
15May 30, 2016 Final Presentation: Week 1 - 7 teams completed. Due: HW#3
16Jun. 6, 2016 Final Presentation: Week 2 - 11 teams completed.
17Jun. 13, 2016 Final Presentation: Week 3 - 12 teams completed.
18Jun. 20, 2016 Final Presentation: Week 4

Useful Links

Here're some useful links to information retrieval related resources or further readings.

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://140.124.183.24/.

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.
  1. HW#1: Document Retrieval(I) -- Indexing
    Due: extended to Apr. 4, 2016
    [NOTE] The partial dataset is available on the submission site. (https://140.124.183.24/)
    Please use any of your allocated partial dataset files in your team as the input
  2. HW#2: Document Retrieval (II) -- Searching
    Due: extended to May 2, 2016
  3. HW#3: Data Classification
    Due: May 30, 2016
    [NOTE] Dataset available at: Daily and Sports Activity Dataset at UCI ML Repository

Projects

  1. Term Project: paper presentation or system demonstration
    ItemDescriptionTime
    Proposal You are required to submit a proposal for term project one week after midterm exam. May 2, 2016 (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 might have to start the term project presentation as early as May 30, 2016 (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.
    The current schedule for term project presentation has been announced. As of Jun. 1, there are 43 teams in total. Please check if there's any mistakes.
    May 30, Jun. 6, 13, 20, 2016
    ReportEach team is *required* to upload the final report after finishing your presentation.
    The final report should contain at least the following:
    1. presentation slides (for all teams), and
    2. source code, installation/execution instructions, team members and task responsibility (for system projects)
    Jun. 22, 2016 (Wed.)

Exams

  1. Midterm Exam: Apr. 18-23, 2016
  2. Final Exam: Jun. 20-25, 2016

Scores

Please check the homework submission site for more details.
E-mail: jhwang AT csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 20, 2016.
Last Updated: Jun. 27, 2016.