Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2017

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: Wed. and Thu. 2:00-5:00pm
Class Hours: Fri. 9:10-12:00am, R627, 6th Teaching Building
TA: Mr. Liu (s5548765 @ gmail . com) (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. 16, 2017: The term project presentation has been completed. There were 35 presentations in total. Please remember to upload your presentation slides, source codes, and documentation to our homework submission site before Jun. 26, 2017.
The list of 7 IDs for students who did not present their term project are: 0036C201, 102590027, 102598025. 105006001, 102590007, 102590032, 102590047.
Jun. 15, 2017: [NOTE] The current score including all homeworks and midterm exam has been posted. Please check if there's any questions as soon as possible.
May 19, 2017: The current list of term project presentations has been posted (as of May 19, 2017). Please check if there's any errors.
If you haven't submitted the proposal, please do it as soon as possible.
May 12, 2017: [NOTE] HW#3 has been announced.
Mar. 10, 2017: [NOTE] HW#1 has been announced. Please upload your team members list as soon as possible in homework submission site before Mar. 17, 2017.
Feb. 17, 2017: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Spring 2017) 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. 24, 2017	Course Overview
2	Mar. 3, 2017	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. 10, 2017	Chap. 3, Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval	IIR Ch.3, MIR 4.2, Salton Ch.9	HW#1
4	Mar. 17, 2017	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	Due: Team Members List Upload
5	Mar. 24, 2017	Chap. 6, Scoring, term weighting, and the vector space model	IIR Ch.6, MIR 2.5
6	Mar. 31, 2017	Chap. 7, Computing scores in a complete search system	IIR Ch,7, MIR 2.5	Term Project Proposal Due: Team Member Registration Due: HW#1 HW#2
7	Apr. 7, 2017	Chap. 8, Evaluation in information retreival	IIR Ch.8, MIR Ch.3
8	Apr. 14, 2017	Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion	IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5	Due: HW#2
9	Apr. 21, 2017	Chap.11, Probabilistic Information Retrieval (Chap.12, Language Models) Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes	IIR Ch.13	Note: Ch.11, 12 will be briefly skimmed. Only selected topics in Ch.13 will be covered.
10	Apr. 28, 2017	(Midterm Exam)		Due: Proposal
11	May 5, 2017	Chap. 14, Vector space classification	IIR 14.1-14.3	Note: Only selected topics in Ch.14, will be covered.
12	May 12, 2017	Sec. 15.1 Support vector machines Chap. 16, Flat clustering & Chap. 17, Hierarchical clustering Chap. 19, Web search basics	IIR Sec.15.1 IIR Ch.16-17, MIR 5.3 IIR Ch.19, MIR Ch.13	HW#3 Note: Only selected topics in Sec.15-1, Ch.16 & Ch. 17 will be covered.
13	May 19, 2017	Chap. 20, Web crawling and indexes Chap. 21, Link analysis	IIR Ch.20, MIR Ch.13 IIR Ch.21, MIR 2.7	Note: Only selected parts of Ch.21 will be introduced
14	May 26, 2017	Chap.18, Matrix decomposition & latent semantic indexing Advanced Topics: Social computing, Big data analytics (Some applications of IR: CLIR, Multimedia IR, and Semantic Search)		Due: HW#3 Note: Ch. 18 will be briefly skimmed.
15	Jun. 2, 2017	Term Project Presentation (Week 1): 11 teams completed.
16	Jun. 9, 2017	Term Project Presentation (Week 2): 13 teams completed.
17	Jun. 16, 2017	Term Project Presentation (Week 3): 11 teams completed.
18	Jun. 23, 2017	(Leave for JCDL 2017) //

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.

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.

[NOET] The partial data files are available at: https://tinyurl.com/jhwct3v
Before doing homeworks, please remember to upload your team members list as soon as possible before Mar. 17, 2017.

HW#1: Document Retrieval(I) -- Indexing
Due: Mar. 31, 2017
HW#2: Document Retrieval (II) -- Searching
Due: Apr. 14, 2017
HW#3: Text Classification
Due: May 26, 2017

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.	Apr. 28, 2017 (Fri.)
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 Jun. 2, 2017 (Fri.). * Please check the current list of term project presentations (as of Jun. 8, 2017) * [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.	Jun. 2, 9, 16, 2017
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. 26, 2017 (Mon.)

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 17-21, 2017
- Date: (TBD) (Fri.)
- Time: 9:10-12:00am
- Location: R627, 6th Teaching Building
- Range: (TBD)
Final Exam: Jun. 19-23, 2017
- 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.

Current score for HW#1, HW#2, HW#3, and Midterm Exam (as of Jun. 15, 2017)

E-mail: jhwang AT csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 17, 2017.
Last Updated: Jun. 15, 2017.