Informaiton Retrieval and Applications, Spring 2019

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 Fri. 9:10-12:00am
Class Hours: Mon. 15:10-18:00pm, R327, 6th Teaching Building
TA: Mr. Wu (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

Sep. 9, 2019: [NOTE] Due to the regulation of Intellectual Property Office, all course materials have been moved to the iSchool platform in NTUT.
Jun. 21, 2019: [NOTE] The total score has been announced. Please check if there's any questions as soon as possible before Jun. 23, 2019.
May 6, 2019: [NOTE] HW#3 has been announced.
May 1, 2019: The current score has been announced. Please check if there's any questions as soon as possible.
Mar. 26, 2019: [NOTE] HW#2 has been announced.
Mar. 11, 2019: [NOTE] HW#1 has been announced.
Feb. 18, 2019: The homepage for Information Retrieval and Applications (Spring 2019) has been setup.

(Tentative) Schedule

The slides can be downloaded at iSchool platform in NTUT.
Note: IIR - Introduction to Information Retrieval, MIR - Modern Information Retrieval, Salton - Automatic Text Processing

Week	Date	Content	Reading	Note
1	Feb. 18, 2019	Course Overview
2	Feb. 25, 2019	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. 4, 2019	Chap. 3, Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval	IIR Ch.3, MIR 4.2, Salton Ch.9	HW#1
4	Mar. 11, 2019	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
5	Mar. 18, 2019	Chap. 6, Scoring, term weighting, and the vector space model	IIR Ch.6, MIR 2.5
6	Mar. 25, 2019	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. 1, 2019	Chap. 8, Evaluation in information retreival	IIR Ch.8, MIR Ch.3
8	Apr. 8, 2019	Chap. 9, Relevance feedback and query expansion Chap.11, Probabilistic Information Retrieval	IIR Ch.9, MIR Ch.5 IIR Ch.11	Note: Ch.11 will be briefly skimmed.
9	Apr. 15, 2019	(Midterm Exam)		Due: HW#2
10	Apr. 22, 2019	Introduction to AI Cup 2019 (A brief overview of BM25, and Chap.12, Language Model) Chap. 13, Text classification and Naive Bayes	IIR Ch.13	Note: Ch.12 will be briefly skimmed. Only selected topics in Ch.13 will be covered.
11	Apr. 29, 2019	Chap. 14, Vector space classification	IIR 14.1-14.3	Due: Proposal Note: Only selected topics in Ch.14, will be covered.
12	May 6, 2019	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 13, 2019	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 20, 2019	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	May 27, 2019	Term Project Presentation (Week 1).
16	Jun. 3, 2019	Term Project Presentation (Week 2).
17	Jun. 10, 2019	Term Project Presentation (Week 3).
18	Jun. 17, 2019	(Leave for UC) //

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 3 programming homeworks that target at different IR tasks such as indexing, searching, and data analysis.

HW#1 : Index Construction
Due: Mar. 25, 2019
[NOTE] The dataset used for this homework can be downloaded at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1A1nrRuUz6bM862W0wFt1tWIxYpSwEsMl.
The random mapping of the partial file for each student is also under the same link. You can choose any file from your team to test your program.
HW#2 : Query Processing and Search
Due: extended to Apr. 15, 2019
HW#3 : Text Classification
Due: May 20, 2019

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.	extended to Apr. 29, 2019 (Mon.)
Topics	For System demonstration, you are suggested to attend the competition of news stance detection in AI Cup 2019. 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 as early as May 27, 2019 (Mon.). Please check the current schedule for term project presentation. (as of May 27, 2019) * [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.	May 27, Jun. 3, 10, 2019
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. 21, 2019 (Fri.)

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 15-20, 2019
- Date: Apr. 15 (Mon.)
- Time: 15:10-18:00pm
- Location: R327, 6th Teaching Building
- Range: Ch.1-9
Final Exam: Jun. 17-21, 2019
- 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 Total Score (with adjustment) (including HW#1 - HW#3, Midterm Exam, and Term Project, as of Jun. 23, 2019)

E-mail: jhwang AT csie . ntut . edu . tw
Created: Feb. 18, 2019.
Last Updated: Jun. 23, 2019.